


All Your Molecules

by greenglowsgold



Category: FernGully: The Last Rainforest (1992), Glee
Genre: Crysta/Pips is my friend's truest OTP, M/M, Multi, Puckurt Big Bang, little bit of Finn/Quinn/Sam, minor illness-related body horror, this began as complete crack
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-08-15
Updated: 2014-08-15
Packaged: 2018-02-13 07:01:13
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 23,508
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2141523
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/greenglowsgold/pseuds/greenglowsgold
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>At some point, Kurt thinks even Crysta will have to admit that there have been too many humans around lately. Puck's mostly of the same opinion, and would very much like to go home. (Ferngully Crossover)</p>
            </blockquote>





	All Your Molecules

**Author's Note:**

> This one started as a really ridiculous crossover written late at night (because Pterawaters decided to prompt me a Ferngully crossover) and I'm not sure how I got about 23.5k out of the idea, but hey, here we are. Written in full for the 2014 Puckurt Big Bang. Gorgeous art provided by [lunaticaa](http://lunaticaa.livejournal.com/).
> 
> (As far as the crossover goes, a background knowledge of Ferngully is helpful but not necessary. For those of you who haven't seen it, it's about some faeries living in a rainforest in Australia who think humans are extinct until Crysta finds one and accidentally shrinks him for a few days. That's about all you need to know.)

 

 

Kurt was in the process of encouraging a small patch of moss to grow when he felt a distinctive crackle of power in the air, followed by shouting.

“What the _fuck_? What is— What are you— What did you _do_ to me?”

Kurt sighed heavily, leaning further toward the spreading moss, as though that would somehow prevent this from becoming his problem.

“I’m so sorry,” a voice squeaked behind him. “I don’t know what I—”

“Oh shit, the trees are fucking enormous. _Fix me_.”

“I don’t—”

“Marley,” Kurt interrupted sternly. “Go find some help. It’s no use arguing with him.”

“But—”

“Just go. I’ll babysit.” From up here, thank you very much.

A moment later, he heard the flit of wings against the air as Marley flew off in search of someone who actually knew what they were doing. Which, technically, Kurt qualified as such, but he’d had his fill of amateur faeries ages ago. Something about their unstructured magic paired with the spirits of the forest tended to end in shrunken humans, and this was the fourth case in a month.

“Oh, God. You guys fly.”

“Well, of course we do,” Kurt scoffed. “I’m flying right now.” As he said this, he beat his wings, moving a little further up the tree to continue expanding the moss.

“Oh.”

That last sound was very quiet, compared to everything else this guy had been shouting since he’d crashed into Kurt’s peaceful section of the rainforest. Kurt almost bothered to turn around and check if he’d passed out or something equally pathetic, but he didn’t hear a thud, so he figured it was probably fine.

“Can, uh. Can _you_ fix me?” the man asked tentatively, and Kurt fought not to sigh dramatically, though he tended to fail at that sort of battle.

“Okay, someone better qualified—” read: more patient “—than me will be along in a few minutes to explain this to you more thoroughly, but the gist of it? Yes, we can fix you, but no, not right away. The magic is too potent in your body right now to mess with, but it’ll fade in a couple of days and someone will put you back to the gigantic, stomping human you were before. No need to panic,” he added, even though just about everyone who heard that advice tended to ignore it.

There were no sounds of panic, but there was no gratitude for the very helpful and even kindly-delivered information, either. Typical.

“Just stand there quietly, you’re doing great, they’ll be here soon. No one’s going to eat you.”

A snort. “Wasn’t actually worried about that, but thanks.”

“So what were you doing, anyway?” Kurt asked, because he could at times be a sparkling conversationalist. “Cutting down trees? Stepping on baby monkeys? Shooting at insects?”

“What? No!” came the indignant reply. “None of them. I was just... walking.”

“No one’s ‘just walking’ out in the middle of the rainforest.”

“ _You_ are.”

Kurt began adding small flowers to a blackened section of the tree. “We are here because you are _not_ typically here, obviously. That’s the whole point of this arrangement. And, might I point out, I’m not actually walking right now.” He wiggled his feet a little, which hung free in the air rather than being rooted to the ground.

“Well, I wasn’t doing anything,” the man said grumpily. “I’m studying the goddamn ecosystem for a preservation project; I’m trying to _help_.”

Brow furrowed, Kurt considered this. That would be a new one; the spirits were usually more discriminatory about where they let untrained faeries spew their power. There was always the possibility that this man was lying, but he did sound pretty righteously annoyed at the situation. That was something they had in common, then.

“Well, it hardly matters. Like I said, a couple of days and you’ll be back to whatever it was you were up to, anyway.”

He barely heard the muttered “fuck” from behind him, and chose to pretend he hadn’t caught it at all, preferring to focus his attention on the new blossoms growing beneath his hands. He’d leave the human to his own thoughts, and soon it wouldn’t be his problem anymore.

A few minutes later, the sound of wings signaled his relief.

“Marley told me— Oh, dear, so it’s true. That’s the fourth this month.”

“Yes,” Kurt said, twisting around to give Quinn a smile. She was just as tired of these incidents as he was, though perhaps more good-natured about it. “Maybe we should be more careful about letting them out this far without more training.”

“Mm, tell that to Madame ‘They Need to Find Their Own Paths’ back there,” Quinn said, rolling her eyes. “This is the guy, then? Has he threatened us yet?”

“No, he’s been remarkably well-behaved, actually,” Kurt said, gesturing behind him and glancing over his shoulder to actually look at the man for the first time. “He says that—” Kurt stopped, suddenly distracted.

Because, well, how could he look at this man and _not_ be distracted? No, honestly, he’d like to know, because then he could figure out how to stop.

“Kurt?”

“Uh, yes.” He shook himself, finally drawing his eyes back from the man’s biceps and facing Quinn again. “You know, Quinn, it’s fine. I’ll take this one.”

She wrinkled her nose, wings stuttering a little in confusion. “What? Kurt, you _hate_ —”

“Really, I’m alright, I’ve got nothing to do today anyway.”

“If you’re sure,” she said hesitantly.

“I’m sure.” He glanced back one more time. Oh, yes. He was very sure.

A placating smile and a promise to find his way back quickly sent Quinn off with no further questions, and Kurt flew down to land on the thick grass next to the man, who, Kurt was smugly pleased to note, was just barely shorter than him in this form. To be fair, that might have been due to the fact that Kurt’s feet still weren’t quite planted on the ground.

“I thought you said…” the man began, trailing off to look at the clump of leaves through which Quinn had vanished.

“Change of plans,” Kurt said, smiling when the man’s attention was drawn back to him. “I’ll be showing you around.”

 

-

 

A few minutes later, Kurt remembered why he generally didn’t like dealing with humans. This one was particularly nice to look at, sure, but he still had to rely on legs to get around, which meant the journey back home took ten times as long while he struggled with the various plant life. Wings were truly a gift, Kurt mused, and good looks were less distracting when that same body was stumbling over tangles of grass and getting hit in the face with leaves.

“Um. Little help?”

Kurt turned to see the human struggling to pull himself over a tree root that was just a little too tall for him to get a decent grip near the top. Oh, right. He had to start paying more attention to things like that. He landed softly on the top of the root and reached down to grip the human’s arm, pulling him up over the obstacle and not bothering to set him down again until he was over the next two roots as well, in the interest of saving time.

Judging by the way the man panicked and clutched at Kurt’s arms until he was set down, he would not be remotely okay with taking the shortcut of Kurt flying them back. Which was just as well, because while the man was not exactly overly large, he was clearly well-muscled and Kurt didn’t think it would be an easy task to carry him further than short distances.

“Don’t go lifting me higher than a couple feet, okay?” the man said nervously, though the returned connection with the ground had certainly calmed him.

“ _Feet_?”

“Human feet,” he corrected. “Y’know, not so high that the fall would kill me.” He glanced upward at the canopy and winced. “Jeez, and I thought those trees looked tall before…”

Kurt rolled his eyes. “I really can’t think of any reason why you would need to be near the top of the trees.”

“Good.”

This man, Kurt thought, was going to be one of those humans who pretended not to be disappointed when it turned out that they didn’t live up in the clouds or something ridiculous like that. Oh sure, he’d enjoy the personal convenience, but it’d ruin his image of faeries flitting around the clear open sky. Midway up the trees, in an area that could still be called earthy but high enough to be clear of things that stalked the ground was much safer.

“What’s your name?” Kurt asked, figuring that they could get some of this stuff out of the way while they made the long trek back.

“Puck,” the man answered, and a moment later let out some kind of explosive giggle that he tried unsuccessfully to stifle.

Kurt glanced down from where he was fidgeting a little in the air (he could have been home by now, on his own), giving him an incredulous look. Why on earth would his own name be so amusing? It was odd, but Kurt thought he should probably be used to it by now. _Humans_ , Spirits help him…

The human, Puck, gestured helplessly. “Sorry, it’s just— Puck, and with the faeries…” The second round of laughter had a slightly hysterical tinge to it, but after all, he’d been remarkably accepting of the two-or-three-day waiting period, so Kurt would repay him by ignoring the emotional slip. “Guess you haven’t read much Shakespeare, then,” Puck said, when he’d quieted once more.

“Who?”

“Right. Well, that’s better than people who won’t even believe I’ve read it.”

This was probably not the time to mention that Kurt didn’t have a terribly high opinion of people who read, in general. The concept had been explained to his family several times, and while it did seem like a useful method of distributing information (if somewhat lacking in the sense of community that direct communication involved), they could never get past the fact that such a custom relied on chopping down so many trees. One human, noticing their discomfort, had switched tactics and tried to explain something called the internet, but frankly Kurt would be content to never hear about that again.

“What’s your name, then?”

“Huh?”

“You got a name, right? You’re not like, forbidden to tell me or anything?”

“Of course I have a name, I was just—” thinking about all the awful things humans have managed to invent “—making sure we were on the right way back. It looks different from the ground.”

“Oh, yeah, ‘cause you’re usually flying around everywhere.” Puck paused as he had to duck under some heavy leaves, and Kurt briefly lost sight of him. “That’s so _cool_ ,” he added, as he reappeared on the other side.

Kurt’s eyebrows rose. “‘Cool?’” he echoed. “Just a second ago you were freaking out because I lifted you over a tree root.”

“Well, yeah, you were the one pulling me up. No offense, but I don’t actually _know_ you and… It’d just be different if I had my own wings.”

In the interest of being polite to the human who had managed to take this fairly well and who had not been demanding nonstop that they fix him (as most were inclined to do), Kurt did his best to stifle a snort. A human with wings: now there was an image to cheer him up on a dull evening. He didn’t think he’d managed to entirely hide his amusement, but he disguised the bulk of it as a funny sort of cough, and Puck seemed distracted by a passing insect, anyway.

“No way,” he was saying, shuffling on the ground like he wasn’t sure whether he wanted to move closer or back away. “No way, I think that’s a Schayer’s Grasshopper.”

Kurt blinked, took a closer look at the insect that seemed to draw more excitement from Puck than anything else so far. “And?”

“ _And_ , they’re only supposed to be in Tasmania, if they even… I mean, no one’s found any since like, the 90’s; this is _awesome_.” Puck reached into his pocket and pulled out a small, shiny rectangle which he held up in front of him and pressed something until the device flashed. Oh, a camera then. Kurt had seen one or two before, but they were always different shapes. Puck squinted at the camera as soon as he was done, while the grasshopper contentedly examined some grass several feet away. “Will it… will it still work right, if it’s shrunk? I wanna be able to take the picture back with me, I mean, I don’t know for sure that… It’s been a while since I read about Schayer’s…”

“Is there a particular reason you’re so excited about it?” Kurt asked. Generally, he would have expected a reaction that involved more screaming. People weren’t used to insects like this being so ‘big,’ apparently, though Kurt didn’t see the problem; they weren’t even as tall as he was. “There’s dozens of them around.”

“There _are_?” Puck whipped around, finally turning away from the insect to face Kurt. “Grasshoppers in general or this one, specifically?”

“I don’t know. There’s a lot with the same color and markings and everything…”

“This is awesome,” Puck said again. “They’re, wow, really cool but also kind of gross this close.” He looked delighted by that assessment.

“Why are they exciting?” Kurt tried again, very patiently considering how much ground they still had to cover.

“They’re critically endangered,” Puck said, inching closer to the insect. “On the red list, they— crap.”

The grasshopper straightened suddenly, twitching its antennae and then leaping off toward cover.

Kurt reached down to tug on Puck’s arm (which, wow, he had really nice arms), trying to start him off in the right direction again. “Come on, it’s fine. I’m sure you’ll see more of them before you go back.”

Puck’s face lit up, and Kurt had a feeling he’d taken that as a promise.

They were almost home, finally, when Puck seemed to get tired of marveling over the plants and various insects around them (Kurt was glad they’d seen nothing larger, yet, except glimpses of things higher up in the trees) and started to ask questions again. This was probably good for his health, in general, as he’d stumbled several times while trying to crane his neck up to look at something tall, and his knees and hands were starting to look torn.

“What were you doing to the tree back there?”

Humans always asked questions they obviously knew the answers to. ‘Why do you live in a tree?’ ‘How could the lizard tell you which way he went?’ ‘Are you _flying_?’

Then again, Kurt had asked several different humans how they managed to hear properly out of ears shaped like they had, and had received similarly unimpressed looks. His father seemed more baffled over whether humans really needed so many layers of clothing. Presumably, this was just as curious, given the correct perspective.

“I was helping it regrow.”

“Why?”

Not ‘how?’ Huh. “Some of the trees in that area have been infected with something recently. It’s rotting the wood and no other plants want to grow on them.”

“Really?” Puck asked. “We didn’t know about…”

“Why would you? There are never any humans in this area. Not regular-sized.”

“How—”

“Look, not to…” Kurt sighed. He wasn’t being very nice. Again. He really had to work on that, especially around people he’d actually volunteered to spend time with, but it was like a damn reflex. “When we get there, there’ll be a woman who _really_ likes giving great, dramatic speeches about the spirits of the forest and why you’re here and so on, and she’ll appreciate it if she gets to explain it all for the first time. Yeah?”

Puck grinned suddenly, directed toward the ground as he had to watch his feet stepping over some littered bark. “I think I had a teacher in high school like that.” A moment of very pleasant silence, and then— “Do you do that a lot? Fixing the trees and stuff?”

“Pretty much, yeah. That’s what we do: protect the forest.”

“Big job.”

Kurt hummed thoughtfully. “Definitely takes up my time. Humans are always messing something up, so there’s plenty to do.”

“Don’t I know it.”

Honestly, Kurt had kind of forgotten what Puck had said he was doing here. Preservation something? That sounded… new. Interesting. He made a note to ask about that later, since it was looking more and more like that hadn’t been a lie.

“D’you like it?”

“What?” Kurt asked idly. “The forest?”

“No, the work. Fixing the trees; growing stuff.”

Busy for a moment wondering how they were going to take a left turn over the river without flying (but there, that tree stretched all the way across the water, perfect), it took Kurt an extra moment to register the words. “I— what? Why…” Why do you care?

Puck hesitated at the base of the tree. “I dunno, I mean, it’s what you do, you said. Like, all the time. So it’s more than a job, even. I’d kinda hope you enjoyed it.”

Kurt watched Puck, trying to figure out whether he was after an honest answer or just one that made sense, but Puck was waiting expectantly, feet digging into the dirt. “No,” Kurt said finally. “I don’t. I love the forest and I love helping it grow, but this—” He swallowed. “This is just repair work.” It was starting to feel kind of pointless, actually.

And that was his big share of the day, with a stranger he barely knew anything about. It looked like Puck was getting ready to ask more questions, so Kurt flew down to land next to him and grabbed his arm (which, again, was really a very nice arm and Kurt was enjoying having reasons to grab it) to pull him onto the tree.

The system of roots that led across the water was thick and extensive, and perfectly safe to cross on, but Puck was nearly as uncomfortable with the idea as he was with flying. Kurt didn’t entirely understand the fear of the rushing water below when there was no chance he would fall into it, but he kept a hold on Puck’s arm the whole way across, and didn’t complain when Puck rambled on in an obvious attempt to distract himself. By the time they’d hit the other side (almost home now, finally), Puck had a rhythm going, and he was disinclined to stop.

“—wish I could’ve taken a picture, _man_ , they would’ve thought I’d found some crazy cliff or something, if I could get myself in perspective with it. Maybe you could take my picture in front of a tree, actually, and then I could send it home and tell my sister all about the freaking huge forests they have here, she’d eat that up. I’m supposed to be using the camera for the documentation and stuff, but they won’t— shit, they’re expecting me back, they’re gonna freak out. _Finn’s_ gonna freak out, damn, I— Whoa…”

He stopped when they turned into the center of the Grove.

The Grove was a series of trees that had small hollows partway up the trunks, arranged in a circle and facing inwards into a small, rare clearing (kept so only because of the maze of tree roots and the encouragement of faerie foot traffic). It wasn’t a perfect circle, a little staggered and with another layer of trees behind the first, but it left them with a warm nook that felt contained but not isolated. The hollows were useful and marked the area, but most nights, Kurt and many of the others preferred to sleep outside, on the branches or in the mass of vines that stretched between the trees. The circle was only clear on the ground.

It had taken them long enough to return that some others had come back in as well (Kurt suspected that Quinn was around somewhere, waiting to jump on him with questions), but only a scattering, a few here and there, and he doubted human eyes could pick them all out from among the leaves.

This was home. Kurt smiled, looking up and trying to imagine it through new eyes. If the expression on Puck’s face was anything to go by, it was pretty impressive. Watching him, Kurt was struck with the sudden urge to take Puck and show him the Great Tree where they held gatherings, to pull him up into the vines so he could see the canopy Kurt slept under every night, to stand next to him when it got dark and faeries littered glowing trails through the leaves.

Or better yet, he remembered with a tiny jolt of embarrassment, he should take Puck to see Crysta — like he was actually supposed to — so _she_ could show him around and give him the speech that she’d been repeating with almost alarming frequency lately. Kurt glanced around, trying to think where she’d be. Not with the kids, it was too late for that, and obviously not teaching, given how Marley had been running around and causing trouble. No, there she was, over in a corner of the clearing, talking to…

“Oh my God.”

Puck made a soft, questioning noise, reluctant to tear his eyes away from the trees, but finally relented when Kurt didn’t respond, following Kurt’s gaze over to the impossible scene on the other side of the Grove. Because that… that was a human, talking to Crysta. A girl, maybe a little younger and a lot shorter than Puck, who had crossed arms and a pack over one shoulder and who absolutely should not have been here.

“Huh, guess you weren’t kidding when you said you guys get this a lot,” Puck said, unconcerned.

But no, that wasn’t right. For all that the numbers had been going up lately (to the point that this was starting to feel like a hotel for passing, tiny humans), for all that Kurt complained about his routine being so consistently interrupted, it wasn’t supposed to be _this_ frequent. Kurt could still remember a time, just a few years ago, when they could go full seasons without a visit like this, and now there had been two mistakes on the same day. They’d never overlapped before.

Crysta turned just then, eyes lighting up when she spotted them. She didn’t seem to share his concern.

“Oh, bring him over! Come on, we’ve been waiting.” She gestured excitedly — because humans were _exciting_ , didn’t you know — and made room in the small crowd of faeries that had surrounded herself and the girl so that Kurt and Puck could slip in. Kurt spotted Marley shuffling off to the side, looking entirely ashamed and clearly itching to explain herself. Kurt would be very interested in that as well.

“Puck.”

The voice brought Kurt’s mind back to the present moment; he must have missed Crysta asking for a name. He shook himself and resolved to pay closer attention. He generally considered Crysta a very confusing conversationalist, but she probably knew something about what on earth was going on.

Crysta nodded, introducing herself and the girl — Sunshine, who had come from a town nearby to hike through the state park and had gotten profoundly lost, and who seemed very relieved to see another human around. “Marley was telling me about how she found you.”

“I _didn’t_ find him,” Marley protested, somewhat frantically. “I didn’t even see him, and I didn’t direct any magic at him. I was just… I was just working on some mushrooms that’d been beaten down, I swear, and he must’ve walked by at the wrong time or something, but I didn’t even know he was there until he was already small.”

“It’s alright, Marley, not your fault. The forest spirits have been getting more anxious lately. Oh, I’m so _pleased_. Two humans at once, this is fantastic.” Crysta clapped her hands together and giggled. “You’ll want to know all about what you’re doing here, yes?”

Puck and Sunshine both nodded fervently.

“Well, alright then. Let’s get that out of the way, and then you can tell me all about cell phones. Do either of you actually have one with you?”

A moment, and then Sunshine raised her hand slowly.

“ _Excellent_.”

Just as Kurt was settling himself down for the speech, a hand wrapped around his arm and yanked, hard.

“Ow, what— Quinn.”

“Come _on_ ,” she hissed, glancing over her shoulder at the crowd below as she tugged him up into the trees. “You don’t need to hear the speech; you’ve _heard_ the speech, probably have it memorized by now because now we’re up to _five_ this month and someone needs to figure out what’s happening.”

Kurt slid his gaze meaningfully down to the group they’d left and back, raising an eyebrow at Quinn.

Quinn sighed impatiently. “Oh, I _know_ Crysta’s more in touch with the spirits than anyone else, but come on, Kurt, she’s asking about _cell phones_.”

This, Kurt had to admit, was a fair point, and he let Quinn pull him into an unoccupied tree hollow. “I’m not sure what we’re meant to do about it, Quinn. Short of quarantining all the faeries still in training in the Grove until they learn how to manage the power spill, but I’ve already been told that’s not a ‘feasible suggestion.’”

“I’m more interested in what it means than how to stop it. I don’t think it’s anything we’re doing wrong, precisely. I mean, the younger students have always been stupid. _We_ were stupid,” she said, smirking a little at Kurt the way she always did when threatening to bring up that time with the Booyong tree. “But they’re not any worse than they used to be, really, which means something else must have changed.”

“The spirits?” Kurt suggested half-heartedly. “Crysta would say it’s the spirits. But they’d have to be responding to something.”

“Do you think.” Quinn faltered, her wings flitting nervously behind her and lifting her up just a little before she settled. “Maybe it’s just because there are so many more humans around, lately, and the forest has to work harder to catch them all before they find us.”

Kurt chewed his lip, glancing down to the forest floor again. Sunshine was listening with rapt attention, but Puck kept glancing up into the trees, gaze flicking around as he was searching for… Okay, so Kurt actually had no idea what was going through Puck’s head. But the man didn’t seem to be listening very closely considering his worldview had been rather drastically changed and this was the woman trying to explain how they would change him back.

They would change him back, and Sunshine too, and send them off to their friends and hope they had enough sense not to mention where they were for a few days.

“It’s a stupid plan,” Kurt said bitterly. He felt a twinge of static around his ankles, and wondered if it was the forest’s reproach for his lack of faith, or a faltering agreement. “It takes care of them for, what, two, three day at most? And then they’re just as free to tell everyone about us as they were before. Maybe they’re less inclined after meeting us, but that’s not going to work on everyone. Someone’s going to tell.”

“Well, what else would we do?” Quinn folded her arms. “We can’t keep them all here, either.”

Kurt didn’t have anything to say to that, really. “It’s a stupid plan,” he repeated. “I didn’t say I had a better one.”

Quinn sighed, staring out at the weave of vines for a minute. “Sunshine seems nice, at least. I talked to her while we were waiting for you. She says she won’t tell anyone as long as we let her follow us around with her sketchbook.”

“Puck’s okay,” Kurt offers. “He says he was working on… some kind of project, I don’t know, but he said he was here to help. I don’t think he’ll tell.”

“So we’re okay.”

For now. “Yeah.”

“I’m going to go find Santana and Brittany. I was working on that patch by the river.”

“Yeah,” Kurt said again, and winced. Unhelpful.

He followed Quinn out of the hollow, but veered down to the clearing instead of flying off through the trees, and landed beside Puck. Starting, Puck looked back and forth between Kurt and the treeline, obviously having not paid enough attention to know where exactly he’d come from. “Hey,” he said after a moment, apparently deciding it didn’t matter. “So, Kir— Uh.”

“Crysta,” Kurt supplied, glancing toward the faerie who was currently gesturing widely and explaining the way the forest _felt_. It was interesting, but not vital, and if Puck didn’t feel like paying attention to it then, well. Kurt wasn’t going to force him.

“Right, Cyrsta. She says you guys have been shrinking humans for a while, now. Like, the first time this happened was thirty years ago. That must have been exciting, huh?” He grinned like it was a shared joke.

“It was.” Kurt nodded. ‘Exciting’ was perhaps an inaccurate word for it, but he’d leave it at that. He’d been younger, then, and kept more out of the way of things. From his point of view, it had been uneventful until it had been suddenly terrifying.

When he returned his attention to Puck, the man was staring at him.

Kurt shifted, self-conscious. “What?”

Puck shook himself, face melting back into a more neutral expression. “Nothing, you just don’t look— Nothing.” He cleared his throat, glancing down at the ground for a minute. “So, thirty years.”

“We don’t usually get humans very often, though.”

“Still,” Puck said, tilting his head a little as he looked around the clearing. “I would’ve thought… either it’s been going on as long as you can remember and it’s just a thing that happens, or you would’ve found a way to fix it by now if it isn’t normal.”

Kurt blinked. “Has Crysta done the part about the spirits yet?”

“Yeah.”

“Well, then. It’s not really up to us.”

Puck frowned at that, expression aimed once again at the ground, which Kurt realized was a frequent occurrence. Puck’s arms were crossed over his chest and his shoulders drawn in. “So, what do people like me do when we’re stuck around here for a while?”

“Crysta would be happy to have you around,” Kurt started, but changed tactics when he saw Puck’s concerned glance at the faerie who was cooing over Sunshine’s phone, “or you’re welcome to go somewhere else. Just so long as you don’t wander off into the forest and fall down a hole or something, because we can’t change you back if we can’t find you.”

“Right,” Puck laughed. “Uh, what are you going to do?”

“Back to work, I suppose.” Kurt shrugged. “There’s a lot of it, lately.”

“You mind if I,” Puck paused for a moment, barely long enough to notice, “come with you?”

Kurt considered this. Some of the novelty of meeting a strange, gorgeous man had worn off, but Puck was still incredibly pleasant to look at, and even, Kurt found, rather pleasant to talk to. His presence would slow Kurt down, with the limitation it placed on flight, but Kurt could afford to take a slow route, and the company of someone who seemed genuinely excited by all the very ordinary things in the forest sounded… nice, actually.

“Crysta?” He would have made more of an effort to be respectful and not interrupt, but he doubted Crysta would come up for air any time in the next hour, and she didn’t seem to mind. In fact, she hardly seemed to notice. “I’ll keep Puck busy.” She waved them off, thoroughly engrossed in Sunshine’s explanation of the various things one could do with the thing in her hand (“You can play games on it, see, this one’s Angry Birds— er, no, you probably don’t want to play that…”).

“Which way?” Puck asked.

“Er.” Back to where he’d been before made the most sense, but that way led past the girls, which meant Santana teasing him and Quinn worrying and Brittany wanting to know how Puck’s feet didn’t get tired from walking everywhere. Maybe he’d go somewhere else for a while, then, and delay the inevitable. “This way.” He led them in the opposite direction that Quinn had gone. It wasn’t what he’d call a good thing these days, that there was something to do it just about every direction you went, but it was useful in this case.

 

-

 

It was mostly quiet as they walked, which Kurt assumed was due to Puck finally taking a breath and processing a thing or two, but as they headed into a patch of disease, Kurt felt a shift that meant Puck was about to start asking questions again.

Sure enough, “I thought this was the stuff you were supposed to take care of?”

“There’s an awful lot of ‘this stuff,’” Kurt said, gesturing to the blackened patches of fauna in a way that made his stomach flip. Maybe he _should_ stop and… but no, there were other things to do, and it wasn’t even that bad around here. “And there are a lot of animals trying to live in the spaces where it keeps popping up. We’re going to check on some of them.”

“Oh. Alright.” Puck picked his way gingerly between patches of rotted mushrooms. “When you say ‘a lot,’ you mean—”

“I mean a lot, and it never seems to bother you humans,” Kurt grumbled, “It just creeps in from the borders that you touch. Kayna!” he called, eager to move things along. “Kayna, are you around?”

A grouping of bushes to the right rustled, which meant Kurt probably would have seen her and not had to shout, if he’d had the liberty of being further off the forest floor. “Is that you, Kurt?” Kayna poked her head out from the leaves. “Oh, yes. I didn’t expect you this early.” She climbed down the branch she’d been clinging to and joined them on the ground, looking between one and the other. “And who is this?”

“This is Puck.” Kurt gestured between them. “Puck, this is Kayna.” From the look on Puck’s face, Kurt would have to repeat the name several more times before it sunk in.

“Hello,” Kayna said, shaking a leaf free from her furry head.

Puck took a deep breath, but all the came out afterward was a whisper. “I’m talking to a koala.”

“You’re not, actually,” Kurt offered helpfully. “Not yet. You’re talking to yourself.”

“Oh, hush,” Kayna said. “You know it’s strange for them.” She pursed her lips, then. As understanding as she might be, it was nearly as disconcerting to be considered strange yourself, Kurt knew.

“Hello,” Puck said, voice slightly strangled.

“There you go,” Kurt encouraged. To Kayna, he added, “We’re only checking in. Nothing’s spread, has it?”

This was the rest of their day. As they spoke to more animals, Puck grew progressively more comfortable joining the conversations, but he maintained an air of disbelief. Kurt almost felt offended that he didn’t merit the same from Puck, but apparently a faerie could be rationalized as a very small human with wings, while talking animals were just plain weird. Frankly, Kurt thought it was weird that humans dealt regularly with animals that _didn’t_ talk back.

After a longer-than-usual talk with Noe, a little wombat who tended to be just as shy with humans as they were with him, Puck muttered under his breath, “Damn, but I’m gonna feel guilty as hell next time I eat a steak or something.” No matter how many humans had made similar statements before, Kurt had grown no better at taming his discomfort, and Puck flushed heavily, trying to stutter out an unnatural apology.

All in all, though, the news was decent. The rot was spreading, as it always was these days, but Kurt breathed a sigh of relief that it hadn’t spread poison to any animals, yet. Maybe it wouldn’t ever. They couldn’t tell what it would do until it did it, which made Kurt very uneasy. Despite his words to Puck that they were only there to check on things, he found himself healing tiny patches and leaves along the way, his touch bringing back little bits of green. Puck was walking slowly enough that he could afford the delay, and it pierced something in Kurt’s chest to leave the areas black. The forest was meant to be a part of them, or the other way around; if it was suffering like this, how long would it be until they did, too?

A soft beeping noise coming from Puck interrupted Kurt’s thoughts. Kurt turned to him, very confused as to how Puck was making that sound until Puck reached down and pulled a black boxy thing from his pants (which must have had about a hundred pockets, Kurt thought). Oh, of course. Puck was _carrying_ something that made the sound.

“What’s that?” Kurt asked, pleased that at least he sounded more knowledgeable than he would have if he’d voice his original question.

“Uh, it’s my radio,” Puck said, looking nearly as confused as Kurt when he stared at the thing, as if he too was wondering why it was making noise. “It’s so I can talk to everyone back at base when I’m out in the forest, if I need to. I… actually forgot about it.”

Kurt frowned thoughtfully. “I thought that’s what cell phones were for.”

“Well, yeah,” Puck continued distractedly, still focused on the… the radio. “But those don’t always work so good out in the forest. How much do you know about satellites and phone towers?”

Kurt blinked.

“Okay, well. Just— this works better. Also, it’s got a locator built in, so they can find me.”

While Puck was still just standing there, frowning at the radio like he expected it to start talking to him (which, Kurt supposed, maybe he did, if that wass what he normally used it for), Kurt felt a spark of fear dance up his spine. So they caould  _find him_? “Puck. Why is it beeping?”

“I turned it off. We’re not supposed to do that, but I found some monkeys I didn’t want to scare off, right before… you guys shrunk me.” He seemed to realize Kurt was waiting for a real answer, and finally met his eyes. “They’re probably looking for me, ‘cause I haven’t been answering.”

“And they can find you, right? Because of the locating thing?” Kurt asked, a little more frantically than before.

“Yeah. Well, sort of. They might step on me.”

“They can find _us_ ,” Kurt continued, willing Puck to understand. “Can you turn it off?”

“Oh. _Oh_.” Puck’s eyes widened. “Right, that’s bad. Um, no, I can’t turn it off. Not that part of it. I could… break it maybe?” He looked unsure about that, though. Kurt wasn’t sure either; that thing looked sturdy.

He chewed his lip, then, coming to a decision, held out his hand. “Give it to me.”

Puck eyed him warily. “You think _you_ can break it better?”

Kurt bristled a little. First of all, of _course_ he could, or at least as well as Puck. Secondly, that hadn’t been the plan. “I’ll take it and put it somewhere else, so it doesn’t lead them here. There’s nothing else they could find you with, right? They don’t have a locator in you or something?”

“Ew, no,” Puck said, but didn’t give up the radio. “But I was… probably gonna call them to get back, when I was myself again.”

“You can find your own way back, or, or I can go back and get it later. Puck, give it to me.” He thrust his hand out further. Humans moved fast, and there were so many of them.

Puck sighed. “Fine.”

“Thank you,” Kurt said, hardly registering it before his wings lifted him off the ground. “Stay right here, okay? Don’t move. I know I said we weren’t going to eat you but there are actually a few lizards around here who’ve been known to make jokes, and I’m not entirely sure how serious they are.”

Leaving Puck looking deeply unsettled and crouching back into a tall tree, Kurt took off. He didn’t take any particular direction, but just flew straight on through the trees, aiming mostly for ‘as far away as possible.’ He wasn’t sure how long he’d been at it when he started wondering: how far was far enough? He wasn’t sure how determined these humans would be to find Puck, or how far they would look from the point he was supposed to be at. He wasn’t sure— Oh, Spirits, but there was a human _right there_.

Kurt pulled up short, ducking behind a leafy branch as soon as he spotted the human lumbering through the forest, eyes fixed so hard on something in his hands that he hardly seemed to see where he was going, stumbling over the same tree root twice (once for each foot). The human was particularly large, it seemed, larger even than humans normally were, though Kurt hadn’t honestly seen a full-sized human in some time, so maybe he was just unused to the sight. “Puck?” the human called, now looking around, and Kurt jumped.

It was looking for Puck; that meant it knew where the thing in Kurt’s hand was. Kurt dropped the radio like it burned, immediately flying away from the spot, several trees back where he could watch the human from a distance. The human was still looking around, calling and clearly hoping that Puck would answer any second now. He looked more distressed the longer Puck didn’t answer, and began looking closer in whatever small area he must have it narrowed down to, peeking behind bushes. Finally, the human stopped calling and stood silent, while Kurt watched, fascinated despite the danger. Carefully and quietly, he took a few deliberate steps until he stood almost directly over where Kurt had dropped the radio. He bent down to look closer, dragged his hands through the detritus on the forest floor, but came up with nothing. The radio must be too small, now, for him to see.

The human stared at the ground for longer than made sense, because he clearly wasn’t finding what he was looking for, then sighed deeply and ran a hand over his face so that Kurt almost couldn’t see his expression. But of course, since he was supposed to be alone in the forest, he wasn’t really trying to hide, and Kurt couldn’t help feeling a little sorry for him. Finally, the human stood up and pulled out a device that looked just like the one Kurt had carried here. It must be another radio, then, and Kurt was proved right when the human lifted it to his face and started to talk.

“I can’t find him.”

Kurt was too far away to hear the reply.

“No, it’s busted or something. It says he should be _right here_ , but I can’t even find the damn radio. I thought maybe I heard… but there’s nothing here.”

The human glanced around again, like maybe something would come out and prove him wrong.

“Yeah. I don’t know. Yeah, I will. I’m just gonna look around here a little more before I head back, alright? In case I missed something. Okay.”

The human shoved the radio back into his jacket, running his hand over his face again before he cleared his throat and started calling for Puck once more.

The talk of heading back was enough for Kurt, he decided. It seemed as safe as it could be, for the moment, and he certainly couldn’t move the radio now. He wasn’t sure how exactly the things worked, but it seemed like the human would probably be able to tell if it started moving. Kurt turned and flew back toward where he’d left Puck.

He found the man sitting on a tree roots, eating a bar of something which Kurt hoped he’d brought with him rather than found lying around, because humans had almost no idea what was safe to eat. Puck looked up when he approached and leapt to his feet, stuffing a wrapper into his pocket (good, the bar was his, then). “So?”

“I think it’s far enough away,” Kurt said. “There was someone looking for you, though. I couldn’t get it as far as I would have liked.”

“Someone looking?” Puck repeated, waving a hand for more.

Kurt chewed his lip, trying to remember properly. He’d been more focused on whether the human would find him than what he looked like. “Uh, tall. Even for a human. Short hair, but longer than yours.” He glanced at Puck as the man rubbed a distracted hand over the barely-there fuzz on his head. “Paler than you?” Kurt added last, unsure of what else he could come up with.

Puck sighed. “Yeah, I know him. Figured it’d be Finn; I guess ‘freakishly tall’ is a good enough hint.”

“Okay, well. He thinks your thing is broken, because it’s too small to find.”

“Good,” Puck said vaguely, frowning at his shoes like he didn’t believe it really was.

Kurt cleared his throat. “I suppose that answers my question of whether you’ll be missed.” Oh. No, that was the wrong thing to say.

Well, Puck definitely looked upset now. Shit, shit, Kurt was so bad at this.

Kurt hesitated, then reached out a hand to rest it gingerly on Puck’s shoulder, drawing the man’s gaze to him. It wasn’t strictly in his nature to be reassuring to the humans who stumbled across their path, but, well, he could try. “You’re taking this pretty well.”

Puck smiled at him, a little twisted up. “I’m not, actually.”

“Well.” Kurt shrugged. “You haven’t hit anyone or threatened to tell people where we are, or started yelling about conspiracies.” That last one was Kurt’s least favorite. No one ever bothered to explain what the ‘government’ was or did, but they seemed to believe that faeries had something to do with it.

“Ugh.” Puck scrubbed a hand over his face, pressing hard at his eyes before he looked back at Kurt. “People start hitting you?”

“They try,” Kurt corrected. “We have something of an advantage.” He flicked his wings to demonstrate, lifting a little off the ground before settling back down.

“Huh. Still, sucks.”

Yes it did, Kurt thought. He could understand the frustration, but it really shouldn’t take long for the humans to figure out that they weren’t wanted here any more than they wanted to be here. “Like I said, it’s very nice that you haven’t reacted that way.” For a man Kurt had chosen to interact with based on a gorgeous and distracting face, he was turning out to be surprisingly pleasant.

Also, watching him sigh and rub a hand over his head for the fifth time, Kurt was starting to feel sorry for him. Damnit.

“Should we— uh. Let’s go back in,” Kurt offered. By the time they got back, it would be nearly dark enough to fall asleep. A little early, maybe, but Puck was bound to be tired.

“Yeah,” Puck said, and the rest of the walk was in silence.

There was a brief delay in the form of deciding where Puck would sleep, given that he would need to be flown to any of the higher spots and Kurt didn’t get the impression that this was the best time to test Puck’s limits. In the end, he settled on a smaller hollow, down toward the bottom of a tree, which Puck could nearly climb to on his own, needing only an occasional hand from Kurt. It was out of the way and almost never used, but still safely within the circle, and Kurt promised himself he’d return to check on Puck in the morning.

Not that Puck needed checking up on.

Kurt left after that with a quick ‘goodnight,’ letting Puck sort out his own routine for settling down. When he flew back out into the circle, it was barely dusk. He grabbed a bunch of berries off of a nearby plant and munched on them slowly as he found a place among the vines hanging across the open between the trees. Sighing, he sank deep into the cradle of the vines, letting the forest hold him in a way for which he didn’t have enough opportunity, lately.

It was peaceful up here, even with more and more faeries returning to mill around the circle, their glow lighting up the growing dark. He sat and watched the world dim slowly, until, by the time his father found him, he was visible only by his own light.

Burt wanted to know how his day had been (fine), what the humans were like (nice enough, though he could only speak for the one), if he’d heard from the animals (no sickness, not yet), and whether he was worried (not to the extent that he’d tell his father, no).

“I am,” Burt admitted, drawing Kurt’s sharp attention. His own answer had been a lie, but if his dad was worried about all this too…

“What do you think about it?”

“Things are changing quickly,” Burt said. “Usually means something else it gonna change big, too, to settle it all out. But,” he continued, glancing around the grove of trees, “I trust the forest.”

As all the elders did. Asking if he was sure, Kurt knew, would not go over well.

He considered it, after he’d said goodnight to his father. He’d been taught all his life to trust the forest and its spirits, but trusting, he’d discovered around the time the humans had come back, wasn’t the same as depending on. It only he knew what he was needed to do.

Kurt sat among the vines until late that night, as faeries’ light settled and dimmed one by one in sleep. He stared up into the canopy of trees, searching for a sign.

 

-

 

Dampness greeted him in the morning — because mornings were always damp — so early that he couldn’t remember falling asleep. The soft chatter of early risers and birds overhead drew his eyes open as he yawned. He rose gently off the hammock of vines and shook out his wings, flicking tiny drops of gathering dew down toward the forest floor. It felt like a nicer morning than most; refreshing, even though he’d been up late and probably should’ve gotten more rest.

Since it was before the typical hour for waking up, Kurt rose quietly, and flew to a little fall in the nearby river to wash himself off and make sure he was fully awake. He shook his head dry before taking the slow route back, feeling more calm than he had in ages.

The calm lasted as he flew back, as he said good morning to his father and Mercedes, and up until he decided it was late enough now to go check on his hu— to check on the human he’d put to bed in a tree hollow. As he got near it, he heard a small commotion coming from inside, and some of the ease fell out of his shoulders with a sigh. Ah, no. Well, he’d been waiting for this since yesterday…

“It’s just so weird that you don’t have any wings,” Brittany was saying, as Puck stumbled backwards to avoid Santana’s close examination of his face. “I mean, how do you get anywhere that’s far?”

“In a car,” Puck answered, fast running out of room to retreat, “or, or a plane, or… Could you stop that?”

“No,” Santana said easily, now stretching out a hand to look at his fingernails.

“Yes,” Kurt amended, keeping his stance as firm as his voice as he ducked into the hollow to place himself between Santana and Puck. Officially, there wasn’t much space there to put himself in, but Kurt’s voice made Santana back off a few inches, and he took advantage. He ignored the startled ‘Kurt!’ from behind him, choosing not to turn and see whether Puck was pleased or further annoyed by the addition of another faerie into his personal space.

Brittany raised her hand. “I have more questions,” she said, like a peace offering, and Kurt sighed.

“I think the girl who came in yesterday has been happily answering Crysta’s questions since then.”

Huffing, Santana edged in closer again, pressing herself against Kurt’s front to peer over his shoulder at Puck. If she was trying to make him uncomfortable, she… well, it wasn’t enough, anyway. “I like this one,” she said pointedly.

“This one’s _mine_ ,” Kurt said. He realized what he was saying a moment too late, but pointedly ignored the stifled sound behind him.

Santana raised an eyebrow. He blushed, less than comfortable to be the subject of her gaze. Suddenly, she stepped back, raising her hands in surrender. “Well, alright, if he’s _yours_.”

Kurt was grateful he’d spent a considerable portion of his life perfecting how to convey death with his eyes alone.

Tugging sharply on Santana’s hand, Brittany led her out to find the girl whose name Kurt had forgotten. That would buy them a little peace, at least. Kurt watched the girls go, then turned back to Puck, who hadn’t contributed to the conversation in a while. He looked alright, though; a little shell-shocked.

“So, breakfast?” Kurt suggested.

Puck seemed happy to go along with the plan of aggressively moving forward. He balked at the idea of eating berries straight from the tree, at first, but then admitted that Kurt would probably know well enough what wasn’t poisonous.

Kurt rolled his eyes. “Duh,” he muttered, and forgave Puck quickly when he heard the noises Puck made while eating.

“Oh my God,” Puck moaned. “This is crack.”

“What even _is_ crack?” Kurt said lowly, face turned down toward the grass that probably wouldn’t laugh at him for his reddened cheeks.

Luckily, Puck noticed neither the question nor Kurt’s sudden anger at nearby plants. “If these grew anywhere else, they’d be making pies out of them and selling them at every diner in the world.” He licked his fingers thoughtfully, glancing up at the trees around them. “Everything in here seems like it only exists, y’know, _here_.”

Kurt followed his gaze into the leaves above them, feeling much more sober than a moment ago. “Maybe,” he said, hoping his voice came out exactly as steady as he imagined, “but you didn’t know this was here, either, until yesterday. Maybe there are more places.” Please let there be more.

“So what are we doing today?” Puck asked after a few seconds, apparently too distracted to stick with any one thought for long.

“We?” Kurt’s lips curled up in a tiny smile, unasked. “I suppose we’ll be healing the forest, again.”

“Is that all you guys do around here?”

“Not all of us, no. But it’s all I’ve been doing, lately,” Kurt admitted.

“Because it gets you out of social obligations?” Puck asked, and Kurt turned to find him grinning wide. “Oh, come on. Every other faerie I’ve met since I got here, you either haven’t talked to or you told them to go away.”

Kurt frowned. “That is not true,” he said, because he’d had an entire conversation with Quinn, yesterday. It wasn’t his fault Puck had been limited to ground-level and had missed it. “I just enjoy the forest.” And maybe he was hoping one of these days it would give him the answers that all the elders seemed to have and trust already.

Looking back up at the trees, Puck sighed happily. “Yeah. Who wouldn’t?”

So Kurt tugged him off the root they were sitting on and deeper into the forest. He stopped them a few times on the walk to take care of little patches of illness settled close to the ground, growing and destroying with no apparent source. He narrowed his eyes a little at the fifth patch they found. Maybe he should have been spending a bit more time near the ground; it seemed like he’d missed a few things.

Finally, they crossed into the area Kurt had been aiming for initially, what he thought of as one of the major patches of disease. He grimaced, looking around at the extent of the blackness. He hadn’t been here in a while, and it had spread. He pointed them straight at the center, didn’t bother stopping in the outskirts, where he knew other faeries were more likely to stop throughout the day.

“Whoa,” Puck said, the word hissing out of him suddenly (and Kurt realized he’d been quiet since they hit the edge of the diseased area). “I mean, Jesus, you weren’t kidding about this. This is… way worse than the crap you showed me yesterday.”

“It’s a bigger patch.” Kurt focused on the center of it all, feeling an itching sensation under his skin as he approached. He shivered. It felt _wrong_ , in a way he’d never gotten used to. For his own health, he was lucky Quinn cared enough to drag him away from this once in a while. “Wait there,” he said, not bothering to glance over his shoulder when he gave Puck the direction, too busy trying to place himself where the vibrations were the strongest, wriggling up beneath his fingernails and in between the the joints of his bones.

Again, he shuddered, resisting the urge to rub at his skin, because it wouldn’t do any good. The center had shifted since last time, like it was trying to disguise itself, but it was too sticky and dark to hide, and Kurt knelt down, placing his hand flat on the scorch mark that used to be ground. ‘ _Okay_ ,’ he thought to himself. ‘ _Out and_ out.’ He pressed down hard, ignoring the crackling under his fingers as he crushed dead grass. He pressed down and shoved _out_.

It didn’t want to go. Kurt pressed further, pushing more and more of his magic down through his fingertips and into the ground, until it overflowed and threads of blue sparks started to jump in patterns around him. There was a startled yelp from behind him, which he ignored. Almost… if he could just…

But it was pushing back, the burnt and bitter thing that covered the ground. It responded and replied like it was as alive as Kurt, or the forest that used to grow here, like it wasn’t death itself. It was slow to wake, but stubborn as rock, holding ground until Kurt couldn’t press forward, and then shoving him back. Kurt hissed softly, determined to not be moved, but it was like trying to hold back a hurricane by blowing on it.

A single slip, and it jolted his hands from the ground with a snap that felt like a burn, so that he pulled his arms into his chest instinctively. The glow of magic faded around him, leaving him alone on the black ground, with a circle the size of his hands lying brown and healthy in front of him.

It wasn’t enough, though. The center hadn’t been fixed, it had moved; he could feel it, just a little bit off to his left. He sighed.

“Whoa.”

And again, rubbing his hand over his face briefly then pressing both hands down into the dirt where it was soothingly cool.

“Um, what was that?” Puck asked carefully, when after a minute Kurt still hadn’t turned to acknowledge him.

“Nothing,” Kurt said. “It was nothing.” Useless.

The dirt under his hands protested. _It_ didn’t feel useless. Kurt smiled as the impulse traveled up his arms, curled his fingers a little deeper into the circle and urged it along, until a few proud sprigs of grass stretched up to wave in the dim light.

“That’s amazing,” Puck breathed softly, and Kurt almost jumped to realize the man was kneeling right beside him. He hadn’t even heard him approach. Puck reached out a hand, and Kurt was about to tell him to be careful, take it back, but Puck only brushed his fingers lightly along the very tips of the grass blades, and they didn’t object to his presence. “You weren’t doing this yesterday.”

Kurt cleared his throat, trying to cough out the sticky feeling of the not-magic that still lingered around him. “I was, actually. Right when I first met you.”

“Oh.” Puck paused. “Right, yeah, but I wasn’t paying attention, then. Still working on being shrunk, y’know?”

Kurt hummed in agreement, watching Puck’s fingers continue to play with the grass.

“You do this all day?”

“Nearly,” Kurt said, nodding.

“Alright.” Puck smiled. “I don’t think I’m gonna get bored.”

But he did, of course, because even fantastic things started to look normal when they happened a hundred times in the row. He didn’t mention anything, just continued trailing after Kurt, examining the plants that sprang up slowly in the expanding circle, a little island in the middle of the wasteland. Kurt didn’t notice at first, caught up in the work. It was slow going.

Finally, leaning back to stretch out his shoulders, Kurt saw Puck idly staring up at the blackened trees and realized how much time had passed, and without any complaint. He cast around for something Puck could do, some task Kurt could assign him, but it was really no good. Puck couldn’t help with the healing, of course, and he couldn’t go far because he was stuck to the ground, which limited the options severely. With no other ideas, Kurt called Puck’s name to grab his attention and asked him why he’d been in the forest yesterday.

“I’m not interrogating you,” Kurt said next, rolling his eyes at Puck’s affronted expression. “You said you were doing something helpful; I believe you.” Or, at least, he believed Puck was _trying_ to be helpful, whether it was having that effect or not. “So what are you doing?”

Conversation was as good a distraction as any other, and Puck took to it quickly once he realized that Kurt had asked out of curiosity rather than suspicion. It worked well enough for Kurt, as well, who found it didn’t slow down his work too much as long as he did more listening than talking.

For the rest of the morning, Kurt heard all about Puck’s work (“research for a conservation organization,” and a whole string of words that didn’t have much context, but he got the general impression), and then where he’d gone to school, and how he wasn’t even from here, but a whole different country across the ocean. Puck had a mother and a sister back there, and a best friend who _wasn’t_ there because he’d come here for the same project. It all sounded very complicated.

The world was a lot bigger than they used to think. Kurt tried to imagine it: huge clumps of land separated by water, so wide they took hours to fly across. Their forest was a tiny section of one of the smallest clumps of land, nearly unnoticeable compared to everything else. It wasn’t encouraging, but if there really was as much land around as humans insisted, surely there had to be another forest like this, somewhere?

Kurt sighed, flopping back to lie on the ground, where at least there was now plenty of space to stretch out while still keeping himself firmly in the fresh, green and dirty section that he’d cleared. He was tired, though; it took a lot of work to start at the center of the illness and move outward.

After a minute, when it became obvious he wasn’t getting right back up, Puck sat down cautiously beside him. He moved slow like he was wary of damaging the new grass, and let out a breath as he thumped down onto his back. He couldn’t be that tired, Kurt thought.

“Can I ask you a question you’ll probably hate?” Puck asked, and Kurt turned his head to the side to raise an eyebrow at him.

“Yes?”

“All this magic stuff.” He waved a hand through the air. “What’s the deal with that? I mean, how does it all work?”

Kurt laughed. “Oh, is _that_ all.”

“I figure you must get that question a lot.”

“Well sure, but it’s not bad.” Especially not when they were lying laxily on the grass. “Thing is, I don’t know how to answer it. Magic doesn’t ‘work,’ it just _is_.”

Puck frowned at him, eyes squinting in the sun. “Well, it must work somehow, or… follow some basic path. Everything has rules for how and why it happens.”

“Science?” Kurt guessed, and Puck nodded. “See, you guys say that a lot, but nobody ever explains how science works, either.” It created a kind of impasse, trying to explain a lifetime’s worth of learning to someone who knew nothing of it.

This conversation, too, stuttered into silence after that, and Kurt’s thoughts were drawn back up to the trees overhead. Maybe he should help out up there, at least a branch or two, it would be easier further away from the ground… But, no, best to start from the middle and hope it would take root and grow out.

“Okay, it’s like… molecules.” When Kurt turned again, Puck wasn’t looking at him, but straight up at the hand he was using to gesture at nothing in the air. “Everything’s made up of molecules. Or, atoms. There’s a hundred-some kinds of atoms, and they’re these tiny little ball things that make everything in the world. The atoms put themselves together and make molecules, and the molecules pile up in patterns, and the way it all interacts in is what makes everything different, because there’s like a billion ways they can combine.”

Puck's fingers drifted down to the grass beneath them, running lightly along the blades. Kurt watched in confusion, hoping he'd begin to make sense soon.

"Living things like plants and people are more complicated. The molecules don't just pack together, they make up all these little bits that form cells, and the cell is like, the smallest part of an animal that has everything it needs to be alive. There's some things — bacteria — that're just one cell. But animals and plants have billions, and the cells all work together to make a body function." He paused and licked his lips, finally glancing over to Kurt. "Does that... make any sense?"

Kurt stared at the hand that had been brushing over the grass, and then lifted one of his own hands up before his face. He squinted at it rather than answering, trying to figure out where the 'cells' could be, if they were supposed to be inside him.

"No, no," Puck said, with a tiny laugh. He grabbed the hand away from Kurt's face. "You can't see them."

"Then how do you know they're there?"

Puck looked startled by the question. "Um, there's these instrume— machines that can see things a lot smaller than we can, and uh, I don't know all of it, but people've done experiments for centuries and there's tons of evidence for it, even the stuff we can't really see."

Kurt looked at his hand again, which Puck still held onto, propped up on one elbow so he hovered a little taller than Kurt. Following his gaze, Puck traced a finger along Kurt's hand. Kurt nearly jerked his hand away, wondering what he was doing, until Puck spoke again.

"Can you feel the line, here?"

Reaching out his other hand, Kurt put his finger next to Puck's tracing the faint groove across his palm. "Yeah..."

"And all the little tiny lines, and the wrinkles? If you look close, it's not totally smooth, right?"

Kurt squinted at the patterns on his palm, close and light. "Those are cells?"

"No, sorry, I meant... The cells are even smaller than that, but the point is, you can kind of see the layout, right? Like it's made of little pieces coming together? Cells are like that, but tinier." He looked up from Kurt's hand, searching his eyes instead. "I guess that's a 'no' on the understanding thing, then."

Kurt took a breath and let it out slowly, trying to organize the thoughts into something that made any sense. "You're saying that everything is made of these... molecules. And they're too small to see, but they're in all of us. We're a bunch of little pieces working together."

"Yes!" Puck smiled triumphantly. "And, we're all made of the same stuff, too. Seriously, I forget what number they're on now, 'cause sometimes they find a couple new ones, but there's only about 120 kinds of atoms, and that's it for the whole world."

"Huh." Kurt drew his hand gently out of Puck's grasp (it was let go quickly), rubbing his fingers together. He was still kind of hoping that a cell or two would drop off and he'd be able to see it, no matter what Puck said. He was smaller than humans tended to be; shouldn't that help? "That sounds kind of right, actually."

"Yeah?"

"Yeah. The part about everything being made of the same stuff, anyway. Magic and everything, what we know, it's about connection. I can feel the forest because it's part of me, or I'm part of it."

"What does that mean, when you say you can feel it?" Puck asked, still hovering close in his excitement to hear about it all.

Kurt sat up with a sigh and a stretch, looking out across the burnt patch and resisting the urge to wince. "I don't know. I don't think I can describe what the forest feels like, because I'm always around it. The point is, I know it's there and listening to me. And I listen, too. I can tell how strong the grass is beneath us, here, and where to be careful with my feet, because it's still new."

Puck glanced down guiltily for a moment, but seeing Kurt make no move to stand up or scold him, settled back in to listen.

"Places like this," Kurt said, gesturing out at the disease around their little circle, "feel weird, kind of nasty and itchy and dark. I can feel where the forest isn't."

"But you brought it back," Puck said. He pointed to the grass under them. "Or, a little bit of it."

"You have to think of it less as me making the grass grow, and more me calling to the forest and helping it along. It's a joint process, everything is. That's the point. Connection."

Nodding, Puck sat up next to him. "I get it, I think. I mean," he amended, when he had to meet Kurt's eyes, "not all of it, not the feeling part. But the thing where we're all connected, it kinda makes sense. Like we're all molecules and the world's one giant creature."

It sounded, as far as Kurt could tell with his limited understanding of Puck's version of the world, about as sensible as anything else the human had said. "I suppose."

His agreement seemed to encourage Puck, settling a lightness around his shoulders and a wider smile on his face. "Awesome."

Kurt nodded, then added, "We should get up, now."

"Oh, right." Puck sprang to his feet and off the grass, moving easily into the blackened area as if it didn't bother him in the slightest. Kurt couldn't understand how he wasn't bothered by it, how he couldn't feel the wrongness that seeped from the ground like blood from a wound.

The trouble with Puck's explanation, he realized, was that it implied that humans were connected to everything as well. Which, he supposed, seemed only right. Humans would be part of ‘everything,’ by definition. Their world seemed so separate, though. When Kurt spoke of the world, he meant the forest. When humans spoke of the same, they thought of something huge and incomprehensible, and Kurt wasn’t sure what rules applied there.

Some of the old stories claimed that humans and faeries lived together, once, as friends and fellow inhabitants of the forest. Kurt had never been sure whether to believe those stories; they seemed so impossible. Even if they were, it was so long ago. The humans had certainly forgotten. And if they couldn’t even feel the forest…

Empty, Kurt thought. That was the word for it. The humans seemed empty, like they’d been drained of whatever it was they needed to connect. It was hard to look at Puck — with his smile and his careful steps around the grass — and think ‘empty.’ But what else could it be?

The squirming itch of the dead ground was almost welcome, because it drove other thoughts from his head.

 

-

 

In retrospect, Kurt would realize that he’d worked well past the middle of the day and should have paused to eat or stretch sooner, but at the time he hardly noticed the sun’s movement across the sky, and expected no interruption. So, the twin streaks that shot through the darkened trees and snatched up Puck were a complete surprise, and it took Kurt a moment to give chase.

Puck reacted quicker, and Kurt could hear him yelling even as the sound faded away. He was demanding to be put down, giving no thought to the fact that being dropped from that height was probably dangerous for someone who couldn’t fly. Kurt rolled his eyes as he followed.

One of the winged figures holding Puck’s arm seemed to agree, shaking him just a little as it said, “Calm down, shoulders,” in a familiar voice that carried back to where Kurt flew behind them. He let out a short, startled laugh at the nickname, though it didn’t calm Puck at all. By the time their little trio had landed on a wide branch near the top of a tree (a real tree, not the blackened, dead things they’d come from), he was so worked up that Kurt couldn’t tell if he was panicked or pissed.

“Y-you don’t just _grab people_ and—”

“Don’t whine,” Quinn said. She leaned so she could peer around him and raise an eyebrow at Sam, who was smiling delightedly at his first meeting with the human. “We do it to Kurt all the time.”

Puck followed the gesture of her hand and noticed for the first time that Kurt had followed them and landed on another branch just behind them. “He has _wings_ ,” Puck continued to protest. He glared at Kurt just as much as the others, as though he’d held some part in the plan, but all the same Puck stepped back, closer to Kurt without actually crossing the empty space between the branches. “That means he could catch himself if he fell, whereas _I_ would just end up with a broken neck and—”

“Why would you fall?” Quinn shrugged.

Puck only gaped at her.

“Sorry, dude,” Sam said, with every ounce of sincerity that could possibly be injected into the word. Kurt rolled his eyes all the same; Sam had picked up so many stray bits of vocabulary from the human visitors over the years that his speech could be almost unrecognizable at times. “You guys were working too hard, is all.” He clapped a hand to Puck’s shoulder, and remained in good spirits even as it was immediately shrugged off.

Keeping his eyes on Sam, Kurt pointedly ignored Quinn’s look, that told him the pluralization of those who were working to excess was a lie for the sake of kindness, and he needed to stop acting like an idiot. He was used to such looks.

When he saw that Puck’s discomfort wasn’t fading, Kurt lifted from his branch with a little huff and landed beside him. Puck shifted in closer again, but still didn’t look calm.

“We would have stopped to eat,” Kurt said.

Quinn shook her head. “It’s past time for that.”

Was it that late? Squinting up through the last layer of leaves, Kurt tried to find the position of the sun.

“If this is an intervention, why does it have to happen in a tree?” Puck grumbled, and Kurt turned, brows furrowed, to see him staring hard at the ground in distaste. He understood Puck’s aversion to flying — few humans enjoyed being carted around — but they had landed. He reached out to knock his hand lightly against Puck’s arm, hoping for a response that would help him make sense of this, but Puck only wobbled a bit at the touch and then jerked himself immediately to an exaggerated stiffness. His eyes rose only briefly to glare at Kurt and then returned to the ground.

Even without a spoken reaction, Kurt found he understood. Puck still thought he was going to fall.

Which was silly, Kurt thought. Puck was standing solidly on the tree branch; where was he going to go? Even if he stepped forward and jumped off the edge, it wasn’t as if Kurt couldn’t catch him. Kurt knew humans commonly put themselves high off the ground, as several had described the tall structures they inhabited regularly. Maybe he was still a bit rattled from the flight.

Best to draw his attention away from the ground, in that case. Kurt reached out again, this time slipping his hand into Puck’s and squeezing to try to shift his gaze upward. Puck clearly didn’t see it coming, and jumped again, startled, so that his foot slipped on the branch. To save him from stumbling and wrenching his ankle, Kurt tightened his grip on Puck’s hand, and grabbed one shoulder with his other hand to steady him.

Puck looked almost more startled by the gesture, but his footing stabilized on the branch and his eyes finally came up to look at Kurt.

Kurt frowned. “You okay?”

“Uh.” Puck coughed, looked down and then back up, at Kurt’s hands on him and at Kurt’s face. His hand tightened around Kurt’s. “Yeah.”

“Okay, then,” Kurt said, resigning himself to lending out his crushed fingers for the time being.

“Hey.” Sam was leaning forward again, shifting constantly on the balls of his feet in his excitement. The sun that stretched through the leaves played in patterns on his light hair. “Come on, we’re not all the way up, yet.”

“You mean, up above the tree line, where we’re not _meant_ to go?” Kurt said flatly, ignoring Puck’s wince at the suggestion of climbing higher.

“Well, we all know you’re the very best at making safe, sensible decisions,” Quinn replied, and Kurt could never win a single argument with her. Ever. Damnit. “I’ll keep an eye out for raptors.”

Kurt shook his head. They’d come with a plan, and it wasn’t worth trying to change it. “You mind?” he asked Puck, whose eyes were darting between him and Sam (grabbing at his other arm and clearly ready to take off).

“I.” Puck swallowed. “I guess… not. You _won’t_ drop me, will you?”

“Why do you keep asking that?” Quinn said, which was good, because Kurt was about to ask the same thing, but the withering look Puck sent her made Kurt very glad he hadn’t.

“You think I’m not as strong as Quinn?” he said instead, a little smile on his lips that stayed even after Quinn whacked his shoulder. “Okay, okay, but it’s _pretty_ close.”

He lifted off the branch before Puck could change his mind. They were the close to the top anyway, slowed only a little by the extra weight, but Sam spent the entire time in the air introducing himself to Puck and ignoring the latter’s preoccupation with their increasing height.

“But, I mean, you must have been this high before?” Sam was saying as they broke through the leaves and landed carefully at the peak of a high branch that overlooked the forest. “I know some of your buildings are pretty tall, and, uh…” He searched for the word. “Air-o-planes?”

Puck didn’t answer. He wasn’t paying attention any more. Kurt grinned at his awestruck expression for a moment before following his gaze to the view that so richly deserved such a reaction.

It was beautiful up here. Quinn had known, of course, that Kurt wouldn’t be able to resist the invitation, however much the elders might tell them not to peek above the trees.

The forest seemed to extend forever in each direction. The trees coated everything like a blanket in different shades of green blending into each other. From here, the patches of disease were small and far enough to be hardly visible at all, appearing as no more than a darker shade or a shadow, not a break in the tree line. If Kurt didn’t let his eyes linger, the forest looked healthy and whole, like it covered the whole world.

Beside him, Puck sighed, tension draining out of his body so rapidly he nearly slumped down from his perch. Kurt guided him forward a little until his free hand automatically grabbed a smaller twig in front of them for balance. The hand that held Kurt’s loosened but didn’t let go, so Kurt didn’t bother to release them, either.

“Do you actually know what you’re doing?” Quinn whispered to him, quietly enough that the others were not disturbed from the view.

“Not really,” he admitted. He had no idea, actually. It wasn’t thought, it was a feeling, which was exactly the sort of vague bullshit the elders had been spewing at him for years. He and Quinn had complained about it to each other enough that he knew she was going to hate his answer. “I’m trusting.” He just wasn’t sure _what_.

 

-

 

Quinn and Sam hung around for a while after that, even when Kurt insisted they return to the diseased patch to continue working with the forest. Quinn spared a single look for the circle which Kurt had helped regrow in the center of the area, pursing her lips in disapproval, and tugged him halfway up the nearest tree. She silenced his protests with a bitten, “take it _easy_ for the rest of the day, Kurt,” and he wondered, not for the first time, where he would be without her. He enjoyed not having to know.

Sam stayed with Puck on the ground while Quinn and Kurt spread green back into the trees, talking with him about his work and where he was from. Kurt wanted to be surprised that Quinn had brought him with her, but he knew they’d been spending more time together lately, while Kurt had been buried in tasks like this. He hadn’t been a very good friend, though he couldn’t regret what he’d done instead.

Sam’s conversation was, unlike Brittany’s unguided questions, probably the most relatable conversation Puck would have had since he’d come here, since Sam tended to mirror Crysta’s fascination with the human world. Kurt didn’t catch much of their conversation — except a few phrases here and there, like Puck laughing loudly and telling Sam that “nobody says ‘rad’ anymore, man” — but Puck seemed to be enjoying himself.

Even after Sam and Quinn left (Quinn told him to be home before dark and left him with a light kiss to his temple that sparked and made him feel warmer than the day should have allowed), Puck continued to amuse himself on the ground. Kurt didn’t comment, just let him wander, content in the knowledge that he wouldn’t go far while Kurt was focused on the trees. Eventually, he drew back with a deep, tired sigh.

It wasn’t dark, but the light was beginning to wane in a way that suggested night was not too far off. Kurt glanced between the trees with new leaves and the patch of grass on the black ground. Above and below, the best he could do. He would just have to hope they found a way to sustain themselves, and maybe grow together. He held down the dark thought that they were more likely to be gone within three days, eaten by the blackness.

They needed to go back. Kurt shook his head to clear it, and glanced around for Puck, but the man wasn’t in sight. He frowned and descended to the ground, knowing Puck had to be around here somewhere. Walking on the black earth wasn’t the most pleasant of sensations, but humans were stuck to the ground, so that was where he would find him.

“Puck?” he called, repeating it louder and louder as it went without response. How far could Puck have gone? He should be able to hear.

Kurt shivered a little as the wrongness of the black seeped up through his feet like boiling water. Now that his attention was free again and there was nothing to distract him, he was anxious to leave. “Puck,” he called again, twisting around the dark trees in the direction of home, hoping that at least Puck had kept to familiar grounds.

Around the flaking roots of a tree near the edge of the illness, Kurt finally spotted Puck, who had his back to Kurt and was bent near the base of the tree, like he hadn’t even heard the call. Kurt stepped closer, wondering what Puck could be concentrating on so hard as to block his hearing.

“Hey…”

This time, Puck clearly heard him, and whipped around looking caught. But what…

Kurt blinked, looking down at Puck’s hands. “What are you doing?” Puck had a clear bag in one hand, inside which was a crumpled black bundle of what used to be the bark or leaves of the tree, and his other hand held a weird silver tool. The bag and the tool weren’t as alarming as the guilty expression on his face, though. “What are you doing?” Kurt repeated, harder the second time as he stepped closer, feeling the sudden urge to get between Puck and the tree.

“Nothing… bad.” Puck’s eyes stuttered between his hands and Kurt, and he seemed to draw a little strength from what he saw. “Look, it’s already dead, I’m not _hurting_ it or anything.”

“But you’re taking some of it with you.”

“I just thought… You can try and fight it, but you don’t really know what it is, right? Maybe I could find out how it works, if I took some back with me, if I—”

“You’re going to tell people about us,” Kurt finished, horrified. Whatever he’d been expecting, it wasn’t _this_.

Puck shakes his head so hard that Kurt thinks he must be rattling his brain. “No. _No_. I know people in the labs, I can figure some stuff out without telling them where it’s from. I mean, it’s not perfect, but I think it could help.”

“Puck, you _can’t_.” Kurt wanted to grab the bag from his hands, but he didn’t think that would help. Calm, he told himself. Calm words. But he couldn’t really follow his own advice. “How are you going to keep it a secret? People ask questions, and you’d have to come back here to tell me what you found, anyway, and they could follow you... Someone would figure it out. It’s too risky.”

“Letting this crap stay where it is isn’t risky, too? I know you’re trying to heal it, but you said yourself it’s spreading anyway, so maybe you need a different approach, figure out where it’s coming from so you can stop the source. I can _help_ —”

“I _know_ where it’s coming from; it’s _humans_.” Kurt watched Puck’s eyes go wide at his outburst, but he kept going, because it didn’t matter what he thought about Puck, it didn’t change what his species was doing. “You’ve all been getting closer and closer, we never used to have this many humans coming near here, and the more of you we see, the more disease starts working its way in from the borders. It’s contamination, but we can’t get rid of the source because you won’t _leave_.”

It was quiet for barely a moment before Puck’s eyes hardened. “You’re wrong.”

“What?”

“This isn’t just… just pollution, Kurt. I know what that looks like. They wouldn’t be this _black_ , it’s like they burned. This is a reaction to something specific, I just don’t know what. Look, the plants are dying way too fast, they’re crumbling…” Puck reached out to touch the trunk of the tree, gather some of the loose bark between his fingers, and something deep inside Kurt’s chest rebelled at the image.

Puck’s words cut off as he stared at Kurt’s hand slammed over his own, pressing it tight to the tree.

Kurt didn’t look at their hands at all, only at Puck. “Don’t _touch_ it, don’t take it, don’t tell anyone.” His heart was beating too hard, too fast. “You have the rest of the world, just let us have this.”

Puck swallowed, finally meeting Kurt’s eyes again. “Okay,” he said. “Fine.” He turned the bag over with his free hand and dumped the bits he’d collected out onto the ground. “Happy?”

Not really.

As soon as Kurt’s hand loosened, Puck pulled his own out from underneath and moved away, walking stiffly to put some distance between them but not too far, and Kurt realized it was because he needed Kurt to find his way back. Kurt sighed, the anger draining from him as quickly as it had come and leaving him limp with a shivery sort of feeling. ‘ _Okay, okay,_ ’ he thought. ‘ _It’s okay, he’s not going to tell._ ’

It took Kurt a few more seconds to realize that he was hovering above the ground, having lifted off without thinking, and he gently let himself sink back down, toes curling on contact. He rubbed a hand over his face. They should go back.

When he looked up, he spotted a flash of green that made him pause. Frowning, Kurt bent forward to look closer at the small, handprint-shaped patch of bark that had regrown healthy and brown on the tree, with a tiny leaf sprouting from between the cracks. Had he let something leak through? Shit. He shook his hand out, like that would make it behave. He was acting like those idiot kids, the ones who turned humans like Puck into miniatures.

Yeah, it was time to go back.

He joined Puck cautiously, leading them back in silence because Puck didn’t try to break it, which was good enough for Kurt. It was even better when they crossed out of the patch of forest that had been touched by disease, and the squirming in Kurt’s gut was replaced with the comforting sensation of being surrounded by familiar plants and air. Even his lungs felt lighter, here.

Still, there was a ball sunk heavy in his stomach that he was sure had nothing to do with the forest, and more with the man walking slightly behind him. It wasn’t for want of an apology on either side (he knew he’d been right, he knew, and Puck emptying the bag was enough), but his ears still rang with the volume of their words, with the silence that followed. He winced when he remembered his hand pressing hard over Puck’s and how he’d raised himself off the ground to hover overhead, using his height without thinking twice (or once, even). He just felt… uncomfortable, but he wasn’t sure what to do about it.

Puck hardly looked up from his feet until they had reached the Grove, and when his head finally came up, Kurt thought it was only to find out where the light was coming from. As soon as Puck saw it, he froze, breath escaping from his mouth with a soft “whoa.”

‘ _Show a man something ordinary,_ ’ Kurt thought, and nearly smiled.

In the low light of almost-night, the faeries flying about the clearing were lit up in shades of blue and green, as usual. The way Puck looked up at it, though, one would think it was something fantastic. Kurt glanced away from Puck’s awed face, back to his people above them. It was kind of beautiful.

“It’s like…” Puck paused, face still tilted up. Kurt didn’t think he’d blinked. “Stars. Or fireflies.”

Kurt did smile, this time. Whatever it was that Puck found so amazing, it had cleared away the sour mood better than anything Kurt could have come up with. Also, Kurt didn’t need to feel bad about leaving him here while he went to find Crysta, because he was clearly well-distracted.

“I’ll be back in a minute, okay?”

Puck nodded absently, and only tore his eyes away to turn to Kurt in the last moment before he left. “Hey, d’you have a light like that, too?”

Kurt held back a scoff. Of course he did, he could have said; why would he be the only faerie who didn’t? Instead of answering, he merely lifted off the ground, and let Puck see the blue stream of light he trailed as he flew away. That would do better than words, anyway.

With not a little bit of pride buoying him (it felt nice to be appreciated for something very ordinary about himself), Kurt went in search of Crysta, though in fact it was not much of a search, since she could generally be found in the same place every night, and tonight was not the exception.

“Kurt!” she greeted cheerily. “How’s it going with your human?”

Your human. Kurt sucked in a breath, thinking for a moment that Santana had been spreading rumors about him since this morning, but… no. That was just how Crysta’s mind worked. And now, apparently, his mind, too.

“Well enough. Um.” Now that he was facing her, he wondered why exactly he’d come. “The humans, you can send them home tomorrow, right?”

Her head tilted just slightly to the side. “Well, yes. I suppose the magic should have faded enough by morning. Sunshine will definitely go home; she thinks her parents must be… _freaking out_ , I think she said. What about yours? Pock?”

“Puck,” Kurt corrected automatically.

“Does he want to go back, too?”

“I—” Kurt cut himself off before he could speak more than a syllable. Well, he assumed so but, he didn’t _know_ , did he? He felt a bit uncomfortable putting words in Puck’s mouth unless he was sure about them.

Crysta nodded. “Ask him, then. I’m happy to send him off in the morning, if he wants to go.”

“Thanks,” Kurt said. He didn’t turn to leave.

The pause was long enough that they were joined by a third party, and awkward enough that Kurt almost didn’t even mind Pips landing on the tree and sidling up to Crysta.

“Just give me a minute, Pips,” she said, touching her hand to his briefly before she turned back to Kurt. “Was there something else you wanted to ask me?”

“Yes,” Kurt said, without a clear question in mind. He could ask her about Zach, he knew he could, she was incredibly open even at the worst of times and he was sure she’d answer, but that didn’t mean he should ask. “With…” And not with Pips standing right beside her. “With _humans_ … Have you ever thought…?”

She waited for him to finish, looking encouraging as anything, but Pips was already shuffling uncomfortably where he stood, and Kurt’s wings ached to carry him away.

“I don’t know,” he finished, which wasn’t even a logical end to that sentence.

Crysta only shrugged. “I don’t either,” she said, as if Kurt had made perfect sense. “They’re very interesting, aren’t they?”

“Yes,” Kurt said stiffly. “Uh, I should go— I should ask…”

He leapt from the tree before he could stutter any more.

He didn’t fly far, just enough to be distinctly away, and then lighted on another branch and glanced back. Whether Crysta thought his departure odd or not he couldn’t tell, because Pips had already done an excellent job of distracting her (as he so often did). With his arm around her shoulders, he was tugging her off to whatever he’d been determined to show her, and she laughed as she let herself be led.

Thinking about his own question — whatever it would have been — Kurt shook his head. It hardly mattered, did it? Zach had only stuck around for a couple of days. Crysta had made her priorities clear, since.

He took another moment to himself, wishing he had time to go dunk his head in a waterfall to clear the dust from his mind, and then made his way back down to where he’d left Puck.

“Bored yet?” he asked, clearing his throat when his voice squeaked a little at the end.

“Huh?”

Kurt couldn’t hold in a laugh at how distracted Puck was by the faeries above him.

“Sorry, um. What?” Puck clearly made an effort to turn to him and pay attention, and it was distracting enough that Kurt segued directly into his next words with absolutely no thought.

“Do you want to get a closer look?”

This time, Puck really did give him his full attention. “What?”

Kurt gestured up toward the vines stretching across the clearing with a shrug (a not-a-big-deal-I-promise). Puck had seemed more alright with being flown around by him earlier this afternoon. But then, _now_ …

“Okay,” Puck said unexpectedly (to Kurt, at least, who was too busy over-thinking to listen properly). Even if his expression was a little nervous, he held out his hand easily enough, and Kurt almost took it immediately in his relief.

On second thought, though, Puck had been tugged around by his arm a lot today, and Kurt didn’t want to wrench it out of place. Instead, he wrapped an arm around Puck’s waist and took off from the ground before Puck could say anything about the new arrangement. They reached the vines before he had enough time to react, and Kurt dropped the man — gently — into the cradle of several crisscrossing strands.

“Whoa! This is.” Puck shifted around for a moment, and when he didn’t fall instantly from his perch, began to relax. “Way more solid than I thought it would be. I guess when you’re smaller, it doesn’t take as much to hold you up.”

To a human, Kurt supposed, it would seem odd. But some of these vines were nearly as thick as his body, and Puck’s too now that he was small, so Kurt couldn’t see why he would doubt their hold. “I sleep up here most of the time,” he said.

“No shit? You’re not worried you might roll over and fall?”

Kurt scoffed. “They wouldn’t let me.”

“They?”

Kurt gestured to the vines they were sitting on.

“Oh. Kay.” Puck leaned in closer to the vines like he could see something different if he looked close. “Whatever works for you.”

“But you can continue to sleep in the trees, of course,” Kurt allowed. “Plenty of people do that, too.”

“Privacy,” Puck pointed out.

“Among other things, yes.”

“I like it up here, though.” Puck looked out at the faeries flying around them, eyes darting  between lights with little direction. Kurt couldn’t argue with that, so he merely stayed quiet and let himself sink into the feeling of being carried by the forest.

Though they were enjoying different things, it was a peaceful moment, sitting together in the dark and the cool air.

“I’m really not gonna tell anyone, you know,” Puck said quietly, so much that Kurt almost thought he’d imagined it for a moment.

When he realized Puck had actually said it, he couldn’t think of anything to say in reply besides, “I know.”

“Maybe you’re right, it would’ve been hard to work without someone finding out, but I wasn’t gonna _try_ —” He bit his lip. “I just thought it would help to get ahead of this thing, whatever it is, instead of just doing damage control.”

“I’m trying,” Kurt said. “It just isn’t working. And everyone else… It’s like we’re losing, and we’re not even fighting back.”

“I get it,” Puck said.

After a moment of re-running that sentence in his head, Kurt turned to him with the most disbelieving expression he could muster. Seriously, _what_?

Puck blushed. “I don’t— Not this _exactly_ , but the thing about losing? And, you’ve only got this little patch of the world and it keeps getting smaller. _That_ , I get.”

Kurt waited for him to continue, offering him the benefit of the doubt for the time being.

“Y’know, I may seem all cool and academic now, what with the whole research mission to Australia and everything, but I grew up in this crap-ass town in Ohio and I got shittier grades than I’ll ever admit to, ‘cause I didn’t think I was getting out. And it was like, the longer I didn’t try, the more people told me I wasn’t gonna be worth much, so I cared even less. Like I was stuck in a box that kept getting smaller.”

Kurt had no idea what Ohio was (or grades, or ‘academic’), or why the location was important, but then, it probably wasn’t, since it wasn’t really the point of the story. It was easy enough to put together the parts he understood.

“What changed?”

Running a hand back over his head, Puck snorted, the serious tone suddenly gone from his voice. “Growth spurt,” he said, grinning.

Moving on to lighter topic, then. “If you expect me to be impressed with your size, you should be reminded that I’ve only seen you _after_ Marley got at you with her magic.”

“Just take my word for it. I’m awesome.”

“I’ll have to, since I don’t know what that word means.”

Puck threw a hand over his eyes, laughing. “I like you,” he said brightly, with his eyes still covered.

Kurt felt a sort of heat in his chest when he looked at Puck, wide smile taking up most of his face, skin lighter than usual in the haze of blue-green light that filled the clearing. “All of me?” he challenged, senselessly. “Because I hear I’m made of a thousand little pieces.”

“More like a billion.” Puck reached out and took Kurt’s wrist, lifting it up between their faces. “Too small to see, remember? But yeah, dude. I like ‘em all. All your cells and molecules and whatever.”

Kurt’s eyes were stuck on Puck’s fingers against his skin.

“Also, you look really good for thirty.”

“Fifty-eight,” Kurt corrected, not really paying attention.

However, it was hard _not_ to notice when Puck’s jaw dropped and he froze.

Kurt looked up carefully. “What?”

“Are you— You’re shitting me, right?”

“I’m. No?”

“You are not fifty-eight years old. You look my age.”

Kurt raised an eyebrow. “And how old are you?”

“I’m twenty-five, dude. Fuck.”

Twenty-five? He looked too old for… No, wait, Kurt remembered this. “I think we live longer than humans.”

“Yeah, no shit.” Puck shook his head, shifting his fingers around Kurt’s wrist. “Your heartbeat’s all wonky, too. I guess we’re pretty different.”

Kurt shrugged. “Not so much.”

The problem with Puck was that he was not an idiot. Zach had been cute, too, but when he’d opened his mouth… Well.

“Are you trying to figure out how the lights work?” Kurt asked, watching Puck sweep his eyes over the faeries passing by.

Puck ducked his head. “Maybe.”

“Let me know, then.” Kurt lay back against the vines to watch.

 

-

 

Kurt woke with a start the next morning, wiping the sleep out of his eyes; he’d gotten much more than the night before, and it felt odd. He nearly jumped when he glanced to the left and saw Puck still lying on the vines beside him, asleep.

Oh. Had he fallen asleep first last night, or had Puck? Because if it was him, and Puck had slept here because no one was awake to help him get to a tree…

The motion of their perch, now that Kurt was awake, seemed to disturb Puck as well, who opened his eyes slowly and squinted up at Kurt. “Uh. Morning.”

“Morning,” Kurt replied cautiously.

Puck sat up a little, staring down through the gaps in the vines toward the ground, then up at the trees. “Wow. It’s really pretty up here, when I can actually see it.”

Kurt let out a breath he didn’t realize he’d been holding. Well, even if he had fallen asleep first, at least Puck didn’t seem to mind where he’d spent the night.

“Man, I can’t believe I actually slept in. It’s gotta be… I guess you guys don’t have clocks here, but—”

“You can go home, if you want,” Kurt blurted out.

Puck stared at him.

“I mean, it’s been almost two days, and it’s late enough… The girl who came in when you did is probably already gone.” He wasn’t sure what he was saying. He’d meant to ask about this last night, but it had been so peaceful lying here, and now he just sounded like he wanted Puck gone. He was doing this wrong. Again.

Spirits, it was true, he really had no social skills. Quinn was going to… Well, just roll her eyes at him, really, but he was sure it would feel like a great punishment.

“Oh, well.” Puck sat up completely, stretching out a bit and delaying his answer. “Let’s go and check it out, I guess.”

Kurt gave him a minute to orient himself before flying him down, all the while running through it in his mind. Puck hadn’t actually _said_ he wanted to leave, but— _Shut up_ , Kurt told his brain.

Indeed, Sunshine was nowhere to be found, but talking to Crysta was…

“Holy crap,” Puck whispered, which Kurt felt summed up the situation nicely. Of course, the next thing he said was, “Finn?” which made much less sense.

He realized what it meant when Puck strode forward quickly to wrap one of the two humans standing with Crysta in a strong hug, but it was put to the side in favor of the more important fact that there were _two humans there_. Two. Again. Just a couple of days after the last two. In fact, with Puck still here, that made three total, a number he wouldn’t have even considered before today. Oh, no.

It was more than enough to deal with already, but when Puck finally let go of the man he’d known, Kurt was startled to realize he recognized him too. “You’re the man who was looking!”

The man — Finn, which was a weird name, but okay — frowned. “Do I… know you?” he said slowly, clearly doubting that it could be even a little bit true.

“Never mind,” Kurt said. He wasn’t sure how he would explain stumbling across the man while trying to hide one of the humans’ machines so they couldn’t find either Puck or the faeries.

Luckily, Puck swooped in to rescue him. “I mentioned you.”

Finn looked delighted.

“You been here the whole time, man?”

“Yeah, pretty much.”

“Jesus.” Finn punched him in the shoulder, though not hard enough to make Puck stumble. “We were worried, you asshole.”

While Puck tried to ease his friend through the process of ‘so you found a secret society of faeries and you’re much much shorter than usual, how do you feel about that?’ Kurt tried to process the third human in the clearing. She was very loud.

“I wasn’t even supposed to come this way!” she was saying, running a hand through her hair repeatedly. “I wasn’t going to be anywhere near here; why am I near here?”

“It’s alright, don’t worry.” Crysta was trying her best to provide comfort, but the woman wouldn’t let her get very close.

“I went _north_ ,” she moaned. “Why did I go north? I knew it wasn’t the right way.”

There were many reasons Kurt didn’t want to get involved in this, not least of which was that he could almost pretend there _weren’t_ three humans here if he turned away, so he did. Crysta was better at dealing with the ones who panicked, anyway. She had an almost endless supply of patience, which Kurt thought likely came from dealing with her boyfriend.

“They said the magic would wear off in a couple of days,” Finn was saying, when Kurt started paying attention again.

“‘S what I hear. I guess a girl who came in when I did already left.”

“Oh. Are you…” Finn gestured vaguely around Puck’s body. “All set, then?”

“Uh.” Puck glanced at Kurt as if he had the answer. But of course, Kurt had already told him that. Two humans, Kurt reminded himself. Only two, because Puck was leaving. “Actually, if you’re here, I may as well stick around for a couple more days, right? I still haven’t come up with an excuse for being gone; maybe it’ll be easier with two of us.”

Finn laughed, shoulders relaxing. “Or harder. Man, they’re gonna freak.”

“Well, yeah.”

Kurt sighed. Puck staying was… good, right? It meant they were back to three humans, but he and Finn clearly got along, so that meant less babysitting. Or something.

It was too early in the morning to decide how he felt about all this. Well, it wasn’t really early, but he’d only just woken up, regardless, and he was still tired. Maybe he was catching up from the night before.

Sam and Quinn saved him from mustering up the energy to deal with two companions at once by appearing out of nowhere and offering to take Finn (and Puck, who hadn’t really gotten it the first time around) on what Sam called the Official Tour. Kurt hung back and let them to most of the talking for the rest of the morning. Since they were in charge of showing Finn around, the disease creeping up near the Grove was glossed over, but Kurt noticed it.

There were faeries actually working here, pushing it back from the edge. Some of them were older, even, the ones who usually relied on the spirits as the answer to the problem. Kurt’s heart sank down toward his stomach. He felt nauseous.

“Hey, Quinn,” he said, interrupting an explanation of the Great Tree. She turned from where she was standing beside Finn, smile still on her face and not nearly as concerned as she should be. “I’m gonna take off, if you’re alright here.”

“Kurt. Maybe you should take a day.”

He shook his head. If things were getting this bad, this was no time to take a break. Maybe he should go back to the same place he was at yesterday; instead of spreading it around, just focus on one area.

“Kurt.” She was at his side a moment later, with a hand on his arm and speaking too quietly for the others to hear. “Really, don’t push yourself. People are working on it. And we checked, the animals are still fine.”

“How are you not more freaked out about this?” he hissed.

She shrugged. “Two humans the same day seemed bad, but four this quickly? It’s almost impossible.”

Kurt raised an eyebrow. That was his _point_.

“So if it’s impossible,” she continued. “There must be another reason.”

Pulling back a little to look straight at her, Kurt frowned. “Blaming the spirits? You too, Quinn?”

“Well, what else makes sense? That other girl, she doesn’t even know how she got here.”

Nothing else made sense, he thought about telling her, but that wasn’t an answer to the problem. “I’m going back,” he announced to the group at large, who’d been carefully not watching their conversation.

“At least eat something, first,” Quinn said, exasperated.

“Sure, yeah. You’re good here?” he asked Puck, mostly as a formality, and was surprised to see Puck nearly trip over himself to turn quickly and follow him.

“Actually, I’ll go with you.”

“What?”

“What?” Finn repeated after Kurt, obviously not expecting to be abandoned so soon.

“Yeah, you should take the full tour,” Puck told him. “And, y’know, I’ll meet back up with you later. We won’t be too long.”

Um. “We won’t?”

“We won’t,” Puck said pointedly. “And I’ll make sure he eats,” he added, which made Quinn nod approvingly at him.

“Good enough. Be back before dark. Finn, come see the inside of the tree.”

“There’s an inside?” Finn asked, immediately distracted.

Despite Kurt’s protests over the next several minutes (and the fact that he did, in fact, still feel a little queasy from how close the illness was getting to the Grove), Puck was true to his word, and made him eat. It was mostly accomplished by bugging Kurt until he relented, since Puck still didn’t know enough of what was safe to eat here to go get the food himself and shove it in Kurt’s face, but it was still very effective. Kurt lasted less than ten minutes before giving in, and they munched on some berries on the way to the site they’d been at yesterday.

He lingered on the edge of it, for no real reason other than avoiding seeing the circle he’d rebuilt yesterday and whether it had shrunk overnight, whether it was gone. Touching the border felt different, lighter. He wondered if that mattered.

Kurt steadily ignored the way Puck studied the ground beside him. He must still be determined to figure out what it was, but as long as he wasn’t taking anything back with him, Kurt didn’t mind. It was nice to see someone else invested in this, he had to admit. Puck didn’t mind moving around, either, because he didn’t feel more and more uncomfortable as they reached the center.

The squirming heat through Kurt’s middle led him straight to it.

The patch of grass, he told himself, was absolutely _not_ smaller than yesterday. He shifted his eyes to the side of it and followed the feeling in his gut to the center. “Okay, stand back,” he said, kneeling, and glanced back over his shoulder. He started when he found Puck standing almost directly beside him.

Puck scowled and took a carefully measured two steps back, creating very little space.

“Really? You’re listening to Quinn?”

“She seems worried about you,” Puck replied. “And she’s known you longer. She should know.”

Actually, Kurt was pretty sure Puck had no idea how long he’d known Quinn, or how close they may or may not be, but whatever. “Just… two more steps.”

Puck took one.

Okay, power through. Maybe that was his problem, it always felt like an endurance challenge, but if he could just connect properly with the forest before this disease had time to fight back…

He pushed _hard_. Down, down into the ground, because there had to be earth somewhere in there, right? The blackness could only go so far, he just had to _reach_ it.

Down.

It was empty, so much that he would have shivered if his muscles hadn’t been locked tight. There should have been things in the earth, worms and roots and so on crawling through the dirt, but instead there was nothing. He wondered if this sort of emptiness was anything like he’d imagined had to be in humans for them not to feel the forest, but no, at least in them there was some kind of life, there was a heartbeat.

This was like… a void. He dug his hands in deeper, and it felt like grasping air.

Sparks danced in the corners of his vision, and that was wrong, he hadn’t even found anything to hold onto yet (it hadn’t been this hard before, had it?). But he saw the light and thought, there it is, and yanked hard, and something spit out at him, knocking him roughly in the chest, release.

He was tired.

“Kurt!”

Had he done it?

“Kurt, fuck.”

Something was still on his chest, and when he reached up a hand to bat it off, it was soft and warm.

“Thank God,” someone said above him, and started yanking on his shoulder.

“Geroff,” Kurt mumbled. He tried to sit up under his own steam once he figured out what the hands wanted to do, but couldn’t quite manage it and had to let himself fall into the arms supporting him. “I jus’ need a minute.”

“A minute?” Puck — oh yes, Kurt recognized those arms now, really nice arms — tightened his grip. “Kurt, you need more than just a minute. You were _out_.”

“‘Out?’”

“Unconscious,” Puck said, and Kurt scoffed. “Yeah, you _were_. Don’t tell me you just fell over or some shit; I couldn’t wake you up for a minute, there.”

It was disconcerting that Puck knew exactly what argument Kurt was going to try. And also, that he’d fainted. That had never happened before.

Kurt’s eyes flew open. That had _never happened before_. He scrambled for a better position, pushing Puck’s arms aside, looking for the sport where he’d connected to… Nothing.

There was nothing.

No. He’d felt something, he knew he had. Stronger than before. But, “There’s nothing.”

“Yeah, that one didn’t work,” Puck said, because he hadn’t _felt_ it and he didn’t _know_ and Kurt would later realize that he wasn’t due this resentment, but right now it didn’t make sense that Puck could have been here when that happened and not know how wrong it was that the ground was still pitch black.

Puck also refused to let him try again.

“C’mon, I was here yesterday, you can’t pass this off as normal,” he said, and pushed Kurt back down to rest on the ground. Kurt shivered a little as his skin made contact with the deadened grass. Spirits, he hated it here. Especially since there was so much of _here_.

“You’re not normal,” Kurt muttered in return.

“Eh.” Puck shrugged good-naturedly. “Normal’s relative.”

“No, you’re not even close enough to be related.”

Puck opened his mouth, closed it, let out a laugh. “Dude, your head is whacked. Take five.”

“Five what?”

“Nope. Shush.”

Puck got his way in the end, even in dragging Kurt back without trying anything more, no matter how much Kurt protested that Puck couldn’t _make_ him do anything. (“Maybe not usually, but right now, I’m pretty sure you’re too weak to fight a kitten, Kurt. Or… something proportionately sized, since we’re tiny.”) It was a slow walk, but by the end of it, Kurt was feeling a bit more stable, at least enough that he didn’t freak Quinn out when she and Sam and Finn found them. Puck must have gotten his silent message not to say anything, which was also convenient.

 

-

 

Evening found the five of them curled in piles among the vines, with Finn exclaiming in delight at his first time seeing the faerie lights flying by. Sam and Quinn sat on either side of him, laughing every time he was surprised.

“Do you even know what you’re doing?” he whispered in Quinn’s ear at one point, when Sam and Finn were too distracted with leaning in close and chattering about something that made little sense to pay attention.

“Shut up,” she hissed. It was a shame that the lighting was all wrong to tell if she was blushing, but Kurt smiled regardless. Ha, payback.

He turned back to Puck, satisfied. “Figure out how the lights work, yet?”

Tilting his head toward Kurt, Puck hummed thoughtfully. “I’ve been thinking about fireflies,” he said, which made sense, “and chemicals,” which didn’t. “But I think there must be something to do with your magic that won’t really fit unless I know more about it all.”

“Chemicals?” Kurt asked.

“Yeah. Magnesium.”

“Now you’re just making up words.”

Puck laughed. “That’s not even the worst name for an element. Sit in front of a periodic table and read off Lanthanum and Astatine before you tell me any one of them is weirder than the rest.”

“Trenscal.”

“What?”

Shrugging one shoulder, Kurt gave Puck’s confused expression barely a glance before he went back to watching the faeries. A habit, now. “I thought it was my turn to say a word you wouldn’t understand.”

“Does it even mean anything?”

“Yes.”

“Okay, that’s fair.” Puck lifted himself up on his elbows to look past Kurt and over to the trio sitting to their left. “Boy, they’re really wrapped up in each other over there.”

“You did leave them plenty of time to themselves this afternoon.”

Puck shot him a look. “It’s a good thing I did,” he insisted. “You might not have woken up so soon if I wasn’t there. And if you did, I’m sure you would have been an idiot and tried the same thing again.”

Kurt shrugged, unable to specifically deny it, so he took a different direction. “You stayed because Finn showed up here, though,” he pointed out.

The blue light that washed over Puck’s face distorted his features slightly, just enough to make it look odd when he ducked his head and cleared his throat, which was an uncommon gesture from him already. “Yeah.”

He didn’t give a reply beyond that.

“Well, I’m glad. I mean, I think it was very nice of you. To stay,” Kurt added, just off-beat.

‘ _Nice of you to put up with me_ ,’ he imagined Puck saying, except he didn’t. He only smiled. Spirits, it was a pretty smile, even obscured by the half-light.

He could lean a little closer, Kurt thought, and it would be…

But the time for that probably would have been last night, not now, with friends sitting just to the side of them. And Puck was still going home soon.

Because Kurt was good at compromise (or bad at self-discipline), he settled for laying all the way back against the branches, so that his head bumped up against Puck’s arm, almost as if by accident. Puck ducked his head in to look at him, brows furrowed, but Kurt didn’t bother to move. He closed his eyes. It was very nice, here.

“Are you okay?” Puck asked him.

Kurt wiggled a little deeper into the vines, into Puck’s arm. “Fine.”

“Tired?” Puck chuckled, clearly amused but making an effort to keep his voice low.

“Mmhmm.”

It was true, too. He still felt weary from this afternoon. In fact, he thought he could probably fall asleep right here, with Puck’s cool skin pressing against his forehead, fighting the dense heat that had fallen over the clearing.

 

-

 

Kurt woke up with a tightness in his chest from the dream he’d been having, something amorphous and dark that slipped away as soon as he tried to remember it. He sighed, staring up at the sun-lightened leaves overhead with no real desire to get up. It was quiet, and he still felt tired, heavy from sleep. In fact, he could probably just…

 

The second time he woke up was much louder. Someone was calling his name, and it made his stomach squirm (or maybe his stomach was doing that anyway, which wasn’t right, he wasn’t there). He tried to sit up to see who it was, noticing the hand on his shoulder a moment later, too late, because as soon as he lifted up he felt dizzy and hot and fell right back down.

 

The third time was confusing. He hadn’t fallen asleep in a tree, had he? But he was in one now. He could tell because it was darker, here, and he could feel the texture of the hollow against his back.

“Don’t get up,” someone said, and the order made sense this time, so he just leaned his head to the side to see who it was. Crysta was kneeling beside him, one hand outstretched, looking worried. As a rule, Crysta never looked worried, and it sent a cold jolt of anxiety through Kurt just to see that expression on her. Something must be really wrong.

With a deep breath, he craned his head up to follow the path of her arm all the way down to his own chest, where he could see, spread out from beneath her fingers, a patch of black, dead skin. His skin. Oh, no.

 

-

 

It was kind of funny, how much more worried everyone else seemed to be. Kurt wasn’t sure if it was just because his head was fuzzy, because other people now had to think ‘this could happen to me’ whereas Kurt was past that point, or just because he’d been half-expecting something like this to happen for a while, but he wasn’t as concerned as the others thought he should be. His world had been unbearably small for a while, now.

That didn’t make it any easier to deal with his father, or with Quinn. In fact, whenever he tried smiling at them, it just seemed to disturb them greatly, which meant he was still no good at the comfort thing. He’d been isolating himself so much, maybe, with the forest and no one else, trying to make something work, that he’d reached the point where it was easier to talk to the trees (and, Spirits help him, a human) than his friends. Not that the trees did a very good job of talking back, either.

He waited until he was left alone for a bit, dutifully holding a paste of leaves that they hoped would help over the dead skin, to reach out to the side and dig his fingers into the softness of the tree hollow. ‘ _I’ve done this for you a million times_ ,’ he thought. ‘ _Reach back._ ’

He sat there and felt dirt gather thick under his fingernails, and was grateful for the leaves because they hid whether the blackness might be growing or shrinking, and nothing reached out for him.

 

-

 

Sometime later, there was a hand on his, and he thought for a moment that he’d been wrong and a spirit had touched him, but when his eyes flew open, it was Puck. He tried his best not to look disappointed, because Puck didn’t deserve it and also because it was stupid to hope in the first place.

“Hi,” he said, and didn’t get any more out because Puck spoke over him in the next instant.

“I’m leaving.”

Kurt blinked, fighting the drag of his eyelids. “What?”

“I’m going back.” No, no, bad. “Finn’s all set too, so we’re leaving.” It was tomorrow already? How long had it been? “We’re bringing some of this stuff back with us, to check it out. I know you don’t like it, but there’s two of us, we’ll keep it quiet. I’m just letting you know.”

“No.” Kurt tried to sit up, but Puck just pushed him back down. “Puck, you can’t.”

“Look, there’s not a lot of shit that can infect both plants and humans. This narrows it down, okay? We can figure it out.”

“I’m not human,” Kurt reminded him. The mistake didn’t bother him that much, but Puck’s assumptions were faulty. It wouldn’t work. “We’re connected to the forest, remember?”

Puck’s hand tightened on his, and he felt light. “Still, it’s something. You don’t know; medicine’s advanced now, and it’s— I know you guys are different, but…”

“We’re different,” Kurt repeated. He wasn’t sure why.

Puck let out an odd noise that Kurt didn’t have the brain power to sort out. “This is _bullshit_. Shouldn’t someone be able to like, heal you? I thought that was the point of all your magic.”

“We heal the forest.”

“And who heals you?”

“The forest,” Kurt said, still feeling like he was repeating himself.

“Well, it’s not being very helpful right now,” Puck said, glaring at the tree as if it was to blame.

Kurt either didn’t care enough or didn’t have the energy to remind Puck that the forest was tired, damaged, much more than he was. He wasn’t sure if that was a good enough excuse, but he didn’t think getting pissed about it was worth it. “You should stay,” he mumbled, eyes sliding closed.

“It’s stupid,” Puck said, sounding like he was speaking through layers of dirt, and Kurt wondered if he heard Kurt’s words, wondered if maybe it was better he didn’t. “It’s a tiny little mark and I’ve seen you make a dent in a whole _field_ of this stuff. Someone should be able to just,” he lay a hand over Kurt’s chest, warm and _warm_ , “put a hand on it and…” He trailed off,  because, Kurt thought, he didn’t know what came next.

“You reach,” Kurt told him.

Puck didn’t move, didn’t answer, but several seconds later Kurt felt something building, couldn’t tell what it was, it didn’t feel like anything he knew except he _did_.

The world was suddenly too bright.

 

Something pulled him forward, and he let himself go.

 

“This is weird,” Kurt said when he opened his eyes. The sentiment was essentially the same as that expressed by Puck, though his was perhaps a bit more eloquent.

“What the fuck.”

Kurt pushed his elbows into the ground and sat up, for once not stopped by a gentle push. Puck still had hands pressed loosely to his shoulder and chest, but he was too distracted by the change in their surroundings to also notice Kurt’s movement. Kurt didn’t blame him.

They weren’t in the tree anymore. They were sitting in the middle of a great patch of disease, sunlight streaming in from between the branches of the dead trees, but grass was lush and damp beneath Kurt’s fingers. The circle of green extended just a little beyond his and Puck’s bodies, a miraculous thing that shouldn’t have been there. He wondered if he was dreaming.

“This isn’t real,” he said quietly, running his fingers through the impossible grass.

“It’s real. And you’re here,” said a soft voice from behind them.

Kurt whipped around. Faster than he should have, he realized a moment too late, but he wasn’t overtaken by dizziness or fatigue, didn’t feel any stretch along his chest, and that made him question the stranger’s words immediately.

“Or at least, part of you is,” the stranger amended. They were tall with dark skin, wrapped from the shoulders down with drapes of leaves, hair like a mass of dark vines that rippled in a breeze Kurt couldn’t feel. “But it’s the important part, so I believe it should count.”

“Who are you?” Puck said.

The stranger smiled, still looking at Kurt. “You know me,” they said, and stepped in close enough that their feet shifted onto the healthy patch of grass (Puck’s hand tightened on Kurt’s shoulder). They reached out a thin hand and pressed three fingers lightly to the side of Kurt’s head, and Kurt gasped at the overwhelming sense of safety that flooded from the contact.

“You’re a spirit,” he whispered, for Puck’s benefit as much as his own. Oh. Oh, feeling their presence was one thing, but to speak to them…

“Whoa,” Puck breathed, and paused for a long moment. Then, “Where the hell have you been?”

“ _Puck_ ,” Kurt hissed. He watched the spirit, mortified, but they only raised an eyebrow and waited for Puck to continue, smiling pleasantly.

“It’s just— They’ve all been waiting for you guys to show up and help and you waited until the last minute?” Puck huffed, shaking his head.

The spirit ducked their head in acknowledgement, unashamed but also not angry at the accusation. “I suppose it won’t help your regard to know that we did nothing now, either.”

“Wha—” Puck’s eyebrows furrowed, but Kurt had already understood, was shoving Puck’s hand away from his chest. The skin was clean, unbroken and pale with no sign there had ever been an illness. He thought for a strange, sick moment that it may have just moved, tunneled inward, but no. The mass of hot worms crawling through his chest had vanished, and he knew it had been all pulled out.

“But I’m fine,” Kurt said, and Puck’s head whipped around to see for himself. “Aren’t I?”

“You are,” the spirit conceded, “but it was not our doing.”

Puck’s entire body seemed to relax at those words, even though they were straight proof of what he’d been angry about.

“Then what…”

“You’ve seen it before, I think,” the spirit said, lifting one foot off the ground to sweep their toes across the grass.

Before. Kurt looked down at his chest, at his own hand clamped over Puck’s where he’d moved him away, and at the spirit’s toes brushing the grass, and he remembered a handprint stark against a black tree. It was too big to be his.

“Puck,” he said quietly.

“What?”

“Puck, you’re…” He broke off and pressed a hand to Puck’s chest (slammed a hand, maybe, with how Puck’s breath shot out of him on contact, but Kurt was too distracted to care). He reached, felt for anything that could reply, and oh. _Oh_.

“You’re connected,” the spirit finished, nodding at Puck encouragingly.

“What?” Puck said again. “No, that’s a forest thing, right? That’s magic, and I mean, I’m pretty sure I don’t have that, because I haven’t noticed myself trailing blue sparks and shit around with me at night.”

Kurt would beg to differ, because he can feel it pulsing in Puck’s chest, right alongside the man’s heartbeat. The beat is off, different, and so is the heat of potential, like nothing Kurt has felt before, but they’re there. Puck isn’t empty; he’s overflowing.

Puck was still shaking his head. “Kurt told me he can feel things, feel the forest. I don’t feel anything.”

But Kurt remembered Puck looking down at him, eyes worried, asking, ‘Are you okay?’

“You knew,” he told Puck. “The night before I… You knew I was sick.”

“I.” Puck only looked more confused. “You just seemed tired.”

“What do you feel now?” Kurt asked.

Puck glanced down at the hand on his chest, the hands he still had on Kurt’s skin, back to Kurt’s eyes. “You’re warm,” he said. His nose scrunched as he focused. “And… blue? Like water.”

Kurt smiled at him. He thought, finally, he understood.

“That doesn’t mean anything,” Puck said quickly. “I already know your magic is blue. I’m projecting.”

“You healed him,” the spirit said, and Kurt had almost forgotten they were there, even though it hadn’t been so long since the spirit had last spoken.

“That’s not possible.” Puck’s eyes did not meet the spirit’s.

The spirit took a slow breath, so much that Kurt could almost see the swell of the air around them. “Just because you are different, why would you think you are not part of this world? The stories are true, you know.” The spirit canted it’s head toward Kurt, now. “Humans and faeries used to live together.”

“Modern humans came from Africa,” Puck said, nonsensically.

“It wasn’t that the humans were so much fewer, or that your history is wrong, it was that the forest was larger. All the old stories have truth and lies woven together, now. But we were all of us together, once, until we got separated along the way. That wasn’t meant to happen.”

Puck frowned, stuttered, pushed his denial beyond boundaries because he wasn’t used to this, and Kurt tried to support him by pressing harder, pressing in. The contact made Puck gasp.

“Balance can be more than two sides,” the spirit said. “In our case, it’s many. We all need each other.”

Balance, Kurt thought. His hand over Puck’s on the dead tree. Puck’s hand on his chest.

“Come here,” he said, tugging Puck over to the edge of their circle, where the ground was still painted black. He put one of Puck’s hands flat on the ground, and curled both of his own around it, pressing it down into the dark earth. He turned his head back over his shoulder to find the spirit. “You said this is real?”

“Of course,” the spirit sighed. Their feet were already relaxing, melting into the ground.

Puck still looked uncertain. “I don’t know—”

“You’ve done it before,” Kurt assured him, and flicked his eyes down to his own chest. Puck’s hand followed, curling his fingers around Kurt’s heart.

“Okay.”

Kurt reached. Through Puck, tugging him along, and down into the earth. The blackness didn’t press back, didn’t eat away at him; it dissolved, falling under the combined force. Kurt watched a ripple of healthy green spread from their hands, stretching rapidly across the ground, up trees, weaving through roots. Sparks of blue danced with the motion, mixed with new colors.

Soon, the clearing dimmed as leaves grew and shaded them from the sun, but the light from their hands reflected off Puck’s face, and his eyes shone.

 

-

 

“Humans,” Kurt informed his companion, “are entirely too big.”

“Yeah, I’ve tried both, and I gotta say, I think it’s just that faeries are way too small.”

“At least when you were the wrong size, you didn’t have to worry about stepping on your family,” Kurt grumbled.

Puck put an arm around his shoulders. “I thought you were supposed to be coordinated.”

Kurt made a face. Even his wings felt clumsy, now. He was halfway up the treeline and his feet were still on the ground. This was a nightmare.

“My turf, my size,” Puck continued. “Don’t worry, you’ll get used to it.”

Looking over his shoulder at Quinn (who could fit in the palm of his hand now, as weird as that was), Kurt wished briefly that she were going with him, if only to have someone else around who understood how concerned he was about crushing things. She was distracted with her goodbyes, hovering with Sam all the way up near Finn’s face (which was very high).

“Next time,” Finn was promising them.

Shame they had decided that sending only one faerie at first would be best.

“Don’t worry about it,” Puck said, probably catching some of the naked apprehension Kurt was sure showed on his face. “We’re starting small. There’s only like ten of us back at camp. Mike and Tina are gonna _flip_ , seriously. Uh, a good way.”

“Well, also in a bad way,” Finn said, joining them. “We’ve been gone for like, a week, and they probably think we got eaten by a jungle cat.”

Puck grimaced. “Yeah, it’s a good thing you’re coming back with us, Kurt. I don’t think there’s any good excuse short of being kidnapped by faeries, and we have proof of that one.”

Quinn flew up to whisper in Kurt’s ear. “If they give you any trouble, tell them you can set things on fire with your mind.”

“Quinn!” Kurt hissed. He waved her away, though gently, because his hands were much too big now. She darted out of the way and swooped in to press a tiny kiss to his temple, then flew back to the ground.

Kurt waved goodbye. He would be back soon, he reminded himself. And he would be back to his regular size, too.

“Okay, this way back?” Finn squinted at a piece of paper in his hands. “Yeah,” he said more decisively. “This way.”

Each of Kurt’s steps took his further than expected, faster than he wanted to leave. Deep breath, he reminded himself. He dug his bare toes into the grass with every step. It was harder to recognize landmarks from the new perspective, but he recognized the roots over there, that tree, this area that had been overrun with disease just a few days ago, now covered in dozens of different types of plants. He tried his best not to squish any of them.

Puck seemed to recognize it, too. “Hey, I’ve been meaning to ask,” he said, picking his way over the flowers and grasses. “When you were… feeling me, or whatever?” Finn snorted from up ahead, and Puck yelled a word the Kurt didn’t know before turning back. “Anyway. Did I have a color?”

Kurt smiled. “It’s not quite the same, but if I had to say, I’d go with orange.” He tilted his face up, so much closer to the tops of the trees than he was used to. “Like the sun.”

What could have been a quiet moment was ruined when he tripped over a tree root and stumbled forward. Puck, who’d apparently been waiting for the failure of Kurt’s newly human-sized limbs, shot out a hand and grabbed Kurt to steady him. He wrapped his fingers solidly around Kurt’s hand.

“Maybe you need a hand for a while,” he said cautiously, like he was waiting to see if Kurt might tell him to let go.

He didn’t, of course. He was days past that option.

“C’mon, guys,” Finn yelled back to them. “We are _so_ late.”

Kurt grimaced. He was going, wasn’t he? They didn’t need to _rush_.

Puck squeezed his hand until his shoulders relaxed a little. “You’ll like it, Kurt. I promise.” He tugged them forward, out past the points that Kurt knew. “You won’t believe how big the world is."

 

 


End file.
